45th Millennium
by Thefallenheart
Summary: It is the 45th millennium and the Imperium is dead.
1. Territory of Wolves

With the sudden death of the Emperor and the dawning of the Age of Unreason the Sons of Russ continued to fight as they ever had done. Great Companies in far flung parts of the galaxy, after concluding business of their own, immediately set their sails for Fenris. All took years and many took decades without the great lighthouse of the Astronomican. With the wider galaxy now all but cut off from them the Space Wolves vowed to hold a line against the encroaching night. The news of the Emperors death was bitter to swallow, many rejected it at first claiming it was some sort of deception. Worse, maybe, were those who accepted it without question seeing it as a punishment for their failings. But as the years passed and the Astronomican remained dark and news from the worlds of the greater Imperium stopped almost overnight even the strongest denial wavered and fell. The Emperor was dead, The Imperium had fallen. This begged the question of what their purpose was, now that he to whom all oaths were ultimately sworn to and by was dead.

Were it not for Bjorn the Fellhanded the fate of the Space Wolves might have been twisted into something more sinister.

It was Bjorn, oldest and wisest of his kindred, who reminded them of their purpose. Their order stretched back, back to the days when the Imperium was just a dream in the minds of a precious few. Back when Russ had walked amongst them, back when they had been given their duty by the Emperor. Although the Emperor was dead and his realm in ruins their own purpose had not changed. All that had happened was that new obstacles had been placed in their path, and when had insurmountable tasks ever worried any true Fenrisian man?

They set out on patrols of the worlds close to Fenris, the warp was too wild and dangerous to travel deep and fast. All the worlds that swore loyalty to the Great Wolf Ragnar, all those that would provide the means for savage Fenris to aid its other neighbours would be welcomed as brothers and sisters in the new Protectorate. As Old Night closed in on the worlds of humanity and the chill of the void was felt all the keener none refused. The brutal order and protection of barbarians could only be preferred to what might dwell between the stars.

For a time things were almost happy in the Halls of the Fang and the worlds that fell under its rule.

But it was not to last. Emboldened by the death of the Emperor the followers of gods too dark and terrible to name began to rise out of the shadows. The Wolves were forced to spread themselves thinner and further to protect their flocks. Uprisings, rebellions and insurrections were rife and worst of all the savants of the Ruinous Ones were relatively unhindered by the loss of the Astronomican. They had never relied upon Navigator trickery to sail by. The uprisings had reinforcements from outside.

And any son of Russ instantly recognised what form it took. The Thousand Sons, children of Magnus the Red. Upon every contested world the Wolves fought the foul warp magic of the Apostate Sorcerers, deamons met axe blades, traitors met sword points and rebels met bolt-shells as war raged across the light-years. The more the odds were stacked against them the more Space Wolves seemed to relish the taste of battle.

New legends were born in those times as the Wolves carved their way across a hundred worlds, the stars seemed to burn red as they drowned in blood and a hundred new mountains were created as the bodies formed heaps that would have put the Blood God's throne to shame. The people of the ravaged worlds took heart from the example of their protectors and the PDF armies, citizens militias and remnants of the Imperial Guard regiments seemed for a time to stride like the titans of old. But the wars dragged on, it seemed a war without end.

The war raged for nearly five hundred years in one form or another and it taxed the Space Wolves to their utmost to drive the last of the heretics from their Protectorate. But at last, upon the surface of Garm the Great Wolf Ragnar held the chapters banner high. That heavily industrialised world held considerable significance to him and tears of joy and triumph ran freely down his cheeks at having the honour of defending it again.

And it was all a diversion.

Fenris burned.

Winter snow gave way to nuclear fire as whole continents were torched from orbit by atomic warheads. What the radiation and the ignited atmospheres did not kill the nuclear winter did.

Only in the void-shielded, fortified halls of the Fang did any endure. Not without cost. As soon as the bombardments started High Wolf Priest Siguard ordered all the chapters aircraft to be launched and as may members of the primitive tribes as possible brought into the fortified halls of the Fang. He knew what it was the enemy were trying to do. Only native Fenrisians had the correct genetic structures to accept the gene-seed of Russ, without a population to recruit from they would dwindle by time and attrition.

This was not without risks. Using their foul sorceries the Thousand Sons had spotted where all the hidden entrances were to be found. All the secret tunnels that circumvented the void-shield.

Every initiate, aspirant, serf and Blood Claw capable of holding a gun were given a weapon and a tunnel to protect. Even the tribal men were given the most basic and rudimentary instructions in how to handle the "Weapons of Thunder and Fire" and were pressed into service, a duty for the most part they accepted without complaint and even some with a feral eagerness.

Using everything they had they held out just long enough for their brethren to return.

Many had died. Of the Sons of Russ only a handful of Blood Claws led by Lukas the Trickster and two of the dreadnaughts survived, Ulrik the Slayer and Bjorn the Fellhanded. Lukas was, for his relative seniority, promoted to the rank of Wolf Lord; the four Blood Claws were the only other surviving members of his Great Company.

Were it not for the arrival of the Space Wolf fleet the annihilation would have been complete. With fresh warriors on the ground the fate of the blasphemers was sealed, but in space things were looking dire. New stars lit up the heavens and the sky itself seemed to burn as fusion reactors detonated and caused brief new suns to burn so briefly. Despite the Space Wolves tenacity, cunning and savagery they were being pummelled. The heathens had the blessings of their Dark Gods and the God-Emperor was dead. As it looked like the children of Fenris had finally met a foe they could not kill salvation came from a very strange place; Skyrar's Dark Wolves.

An echo from another time, a Great Company exiled for crimes both wicked and debased by the standards of a brotherhood of savages.

And they had come to parlay.

It says something of the nature of those dark days that the Great Wolf was even willing to talk to the old betrayers, but he did something far worse. He granted them amnesty, their sins forgotten if not forgiven.

It was not an act born of kindness. The chapter was in ruins, their homeworld was dead, their Protectorate was on its knees and their brotherhood was down to just over four hundred surviving members.

They simply could not afford another battle so soon, whatever wretched scheme the Dark Wolves were planning could not be helped and anything that stalled them was welcome. As the days, weeks, months and years passed it became abundantly clear that the Dark Wolves were serious, deathly serious, in their desire to repent. Their quarrel was not with their brothers and they, like all Space Wolves, loved their old homeworld dearly. Their detestation had always been towards the Emperor, and now he was at long last dead. Although the Dark Wolves deeply mourned the passing of Fenris they shed not a single tear for the Emperor.

This was the time of the Great Reformations for the Space Wolves and their Protectorate. They could not allow such a tragedy to happen again, there would be no more killing of worlds.

The Protectorate was divided into thirteen fiefdoms and each of the now thirteen Great Companies was given one to protect. Every hundred Fenrisian years each Great Company was to send a representative back the Fang to draw names out of a helmet to determine which fiefdom their brothers were to defend for the next hundred years. Colonies of Fenrisians, descendants of those who were given shelter in the halls of the Fang were seeded across near every world of the Protectorate, a human crop to be harvested when ready. All the Great Companies had to send their aspirants back to the Fang for training and transformation.

The Dark Wolves, by the time of the Reformations known as the Repentant Thirteenth, were never again allowed to have any Rune Priests amongst their ranks. Furthermore their gene-seed was stored separately from their brothers, but they did not seem to mind, it was the course they had chosen.

In the years that followed the Reformations and the long struggle of rebuilding the chapter to anything like its former glory Orks, Necrons, surviving splinter fleet and other post-Imperial emergent empires often attacked the Protectorate. Possibly the most dangerous of these were the Warbands and Legions of the Cadian Commonwealth and it was none other than Emperor Abbadon who narrowly defeated and killed the Great Wolf Ragnar in the winter of 995M44 on the planet Garm.

By the dawning of the 45th millennium the Space Wolves represented one of the few shining lights for humanity in the galaxy.


	2. Slaughterhouse

The death of the Emperor and the collapse of the Imperium was heralded as something of a blessing by many of the galaxies inhabitants, not least of which was the burgeoning Tau empire.

Without the constant threat of extermination at the hands of the Imperial Guard hanging over their heads the Tau began to spread their influence across a thousand worlds around the Eastern Fringe, and they all joined willingly and even eagerly. Mainly this was because the Tau takeover was a purely ideological and secular matter and not a religious one. So long as they worked for the Greater Good they did not care whether their subjects knelt before an eight pointed star or a two-headed bird. Seeming overnight the Empire seemed to double in size as whole civilisations surrendered themselves to the will of the Ethereal caste for the protection they could offer. Truly it was the golden age for the Greater Good.

But it was a brief one. The only warning they got was from their eldar citizens, which were ignored as the mewling of fanatic doomsayers. Within the year there were no eldar to be found in the Tau Empire, many had not even stopped to pack even the most essential of possessions before boarding the fastest coreward vessel. Many, who could spot the signs, followed in their wake.

It started with nothing in particular. A mild increase in birth defects across a hundred worlds, but nothing that could not be rationally explained by changes in universal industrial processes resulting in toxic elements being released into the atmosphere and water supplies. Then came the slight distortions and subtle anomalies in all manner of warp-based activity, but the Tau did not understand such pointless frippery as warp dabbling.

Then they came.

Across the breadth of the Empire worlds on the Galactic Edge were under siege. Expansion into the rest of the galaxy was put on hold indefinitely as ever resource was given to combating the alien horde on the eastern fringe. Billions upon billions of lives were extinguished in the centuries of warfare that resulted and the line across the stars was pushed back leaving nothing but broken airless rocks where freshly terrformed worlds should have been.

In this Age of Trial the Ethereals, perhaps inspired by the finest warriors of the Old Imperium, sanctioned the creation of The Burned. The Tau had long ago seen and embraced the advantages of technological superiority and this could only be its ultimate expression. The finest of the Fire Warriors were called for and by the ingenuity of the master cyberneticists of the Earth Caste were made more devastating than any mortal creature had a right to be. The line between war-gear and soldier became a matter for the philosophers more than the surgeons.

The Tau had before fought the Tyranids and ultimately triumphed over the mindless beasts. Superior technology born from the collective endeavour of dozens of cultures all in service to the Greater Good, the military victory an ideological success. Sacrifices had been made, huge sacrifices, but the Dread Star Locust had been denied the Empire.

But they had defeated the vanguard only.

One by one the sept worlds grew dark. The warriors of the Tau and their allied races fought with the fervour of the righteous, the Greater Good was all and it must endure. The line across the stars was pushed back again, light-year by bloody hard-fought light-year. New technologies of ungodly devastation were wrought, terrible things that could desecrate an entire world with efficiency undreamed of by the mad architects of the Exterminatus. It barely slowed them down. World after world was rendered down and picked to the bone to feed the insatiable hunger of the extra-galactic horror. Gene-stealer cults buried upon a hundred worlds during the previous invasion awoke to the siren call of the Hive Mind and they flung themselves into the gears of the efficient society that had borne them. Anarchy and discord reigned supreme as the Empire tore itself apart from within and crippled itself for the fight for survival.

The orks, with the attention diverted elsewhere, took this opportunity to sack many worlds for loot for the WAAAAAGH! Effort in containing the Necron uprisings. They were, often, the lesser of two evils.

Human and Tau, Vespid and Kroot all fought and died shoulder to shoulder as they reaped a bloody toll upon the tide of murderous chitin only to be ground beneath the unstoppable onslaught. Fire Warriors and their allies from dozens of different species charged into the very face of death with a grim determination to buy the elderly and the young enough time to abandon worlds they had once known as home. And when the last shuttles had roared from the tainted atmospheres and the orbital tethers had had been cut they launched the Planet Killers; insane weapons created from devices of Exterminatus pilfered from a long dead Imperium. A final act of spite, if their worlds were going to be taken from them then the Tau would see them burn before they became the fuel of an abomination.

World after world burned to cinder and ash, plains and forest bathed in radiation and the surfaces of once verdant worlds cooled into whorls and waves of dark glass that seemed to mimic the seas they had once held. The Great Devourer starved and the Hive Fleets turned upon their weaker siblings in cannibalistic orgies that saw on the strongest and shrewdest survive. But still more poured in from beyond the Galactic Edge, fresh nightmares for the ravaged and brutalised Eastern Fringe.

Further and further back the Empire was driven and in their wake worlds of ash and dust and charred corpses turning to bleached bones under uncaring suns. A war of attrition against an innumerable foe that could seemingly have only one outcome. Still further back the upholders of the Greater Good were driven, right back to the sanctum sanctorum of the Empire; T'au.

Upon that world the Ethereals vowed the Hive would be turned back, they would break like water upon stone and would in turn be hunted down and annihilated. Worlds were drained of their warriors and the trade routes were depleted of their ships and the whole Empire poured its heart and soul and very life's blood into the defence of that one world, that one world where an upstart species had dared to believe that was a better way than constant war. Mercenary armies from beyond the Empire were employed at a bankrupting rate and even some surviving Space Marines found their way to T'au still looking to join their Emperor after one last moment of glory. It was even whispered that foul sorceries were being employed and deamonic pacts were being made.

Upon that arid world the Empire died.

None of it was enough; it could never have been enough. The forces levelled against it were too strong, too numerous and too terrible to contemplate. The great cities of T'au were laid siege to and each in a short time fell and drowned in blood and corpses, in some cases the Tyranids walking up the heaps of their own corpses to the tops of the mile tall battlements.

But it was all ultimately in vain.

With the heart ripped out of the Empire and near all of its military either dead or still fleeing the other surviving sept worlds were soon dragged into the dark and swallowed whole.

But the Tau endured, such as they are. You can still see them sometimes in their old ships running as fast as they possibly can, stopping only to enact repairs and take on supplies. They run exactly as fast as their warp-drives will carry them, weeping convoys with no port in sight and each carrying a warning of what is coming, urging others to make the preparations they did not.

Of the Tau Empire only the Farsight Enclave survived, barely. One diamond hard point of savage determination surrounded by worlds turned to graveyards and on his throne an old, old king weeps for the home he can now never return to.


	3. Formosa Imperium

It is the 45th millennium and the wars continue.

Riddled with internal power struggles and corrupt officials the Imperium almost managed to endure into its thirteenth millennium as the enslaving protector of humanity. No one knew the ultimate cause of the Emperors death; some blamed the antique and failing mechanisms of the Golden Throne. Others pointed towards the more insane factions within the Adeptus Assassinatum. Some even claimed that after an age of tempting whispers one of the Custodians finally gave in and submitted to the will of the Ruinous Powers and turned his weapon on his liege. All that was known was that a substantial detachment of Dark Angels were reported to have translated into the Sol system mere hours before the Astronomican went dark. In a single instant the Imperium was snuffed out as a coherent, unified body.

There was no warning, no prelude. Worlds were plunged into uncertainty and turmoil and panic. The great communication network so carefully and lovingly maintained by the Adeptus Astra Telepathica was utterly extinguished in an instant as all those bound by soul to the Emperor were dragged with him into Death's embrace.

Worlds scattered across the galactic disc were forced to depend upon only themselves, and may perished within a year. Many more fell in the years that followed as they found to their dismay and misery that they could not defend against the horrors of the galaxy alone.

Of those that survived the most successful were the aforementioned Fenrisian Protectorate, the Formosa Imperium, the Ultramar Commonality and the Dornian Bulwark.

The Formosa Imperium can trace its founding back to the closing of the 41st millennium and the actions of Inquisitor Torquemada Coteaz. In his long and distinguished career in the ordos Coteaz created an immense network or informants and agents across the entire Formosa sub-sector. It was this network of spies that effectively held together the fractious worlds in the panic of the God-Emperor's death. Equipped and trained to the best standards of the Old Imperium the Inquisitorial Agents wasted no time in worming their way into the hierarchies of the local governments, whether it was by genuine merit and ability, discreet assassinations, the raising of open rebellion or a few well placed bribes. Within the first few years half the sub-sector belonged to the infamous Inquisitor Coteaz who was by then a shadowy figure of legend reminiscent of old children's stories.

But Coteaz was an old man who had lived long, long past his time. The rejuvinent and longevity treatments of the Old Imperium were being tested to their utter upper limit by one old man who knew what would happen to his worlds should he cease his duty. Organ grafts, cybernetic replacements, genetic-resequencing all of these were employed but simple time was inescapable and unrelenting and it followed him always with the sleep of death as its constant companion. The lure of the deamonic grew ever greater and the immortality of chaos became undeniably tempting, but he never gave in to it that temptation. He had seen all too often in his old acquaintances in the Holy Inquisition the result of the blandishments of chaos and had long ago vowed never to tread the path of the radical.

As the years and decades passed and Old Night reclaimed the stars and the realms of the Emperors chosen fell one by one all manner of refugee convoys and old Navy ships began to set their sails for the few still burning embers of human endurance. With them came Navigators and fresh troops and ships that could be repaired, all things that the Formosa Imperium could make use of.

Amongst one of the battered refugee convoys was a near derelict strike cruiser and what was left of one of the stranded companies of the Blood Drinkers and the Silver Skulls who had been campaigning on an ork contested world not too distant from the western border of Formosa when their Astropaths died. In the wars that followed the adopted Astartes held themselves with distinction and were granted a place in the Coteaz's Imperium as a reward. The amalgamated chapter was given recruitment rights over pretty much every world in the realm and, despite the constant effort to fend of orky raiding parties, returned to full strength a little before the dawn of the 44th millennium.

By this time Inquisitor Coteaz had long ago ceased to go into battle himself, his physical frailty unable to be masked even by Powered Armour. He began to inspect the governance of his worlds less and less in person and began delegating more and more of his duties to his Heralds, dark cloaked and hooded (presumably) people who spoke only through vox units issued with the authority to act on his behalf on any matter. It is possible that Coteaz had become the oldest living human in recorded history by this point and it would be dishonest to say he didn't look it. He was skeletally thin and of parchment skin with eyes long ago replaced by discreet prosthetics, along with much of his body. But in those glass eyes still burned the fire that had all those years ago allowed him to endure after the death of his god and the ruination of near everything he held dear.

Orks WAAAAAAGH!'d and chaos rebellions occurred, dark eldar raided and tyrannids devoured but the formidable might of the Formosa Imperium endured. It had to. In the many years that followed the death of the Emperor and the fall of the Old Imperium the worlds out of Inquisitor Coteaz's influence began to fall one by one against things simply too powerful and malevolent to stand against alone. As the date ground past the M44 mark no news reached those worlds of anything outside their collective borders. For all too many light years in every direction it seemed that humanity was extinct, as far as they knew they were the last of true humanity to survive. They had to endure.

And endure they did, always. The Formosa Imperium began to appear as a microcosm of the Imperium of yesteryear with its Imperial Guard, Space Marines, Sororitas convents, Imperial Navy and an almost mythic ruler. The one thing I did not inherit was incompetent governors and corrupt officials, as these were weeded out with merciless efficiency by the interchangeable and utterly anonymous Heralds.

As the 45th millennia dawned the Imperium of Formosa was beset upon all sides by aliens and monsters, but it would endure. Forever if need be.


	4. Empire Reborn

Even by the dawning of M42 the Eldar were beginning to slip down the slope to extinction. More and more of the minor Craftworlds had gone silent, their hearts torn out and their carcasses left to drift through the endless void as silent memorials to failed tenacity. Of the craftworlds that survived innumerable enemies circled like scavengers circling a dying lion that looked like it may have just one last bite left. As the years drifted by and the children of Isha dwindled it seemed that all hope had been in vain.

The puritan denizens down to the last man, woman and child abandoned many of the Exodite worlds, soul-stones were taken on mass and even the great nebulous World-Spirits were packed up and integrated into the Infinity Circuits of the more defendable Craftworlds. Even Beil-Tann, the dream of an Empire reborn, abandoned its grandiose ambitions for conquest and wished for nothing more than to simply survive the endless storm.

Suicide cults began to form amongst the Craftworlders as it seemed that death was inevitable and only the birth of the death god Ynnead could offer their inevitable extinction any meaning. These cults were small at first, little things niggling away at the socially outcast, but they grew. As without warning the Harlequins, and every avatar of the murder god, vanished from every corner of the galaxy in the summer of 501M42 the despair spilled over. Suicide cults and despair driven Nurglite corruption came out of the shadows and was embraced by many in positions of authority. Death was certain and should be embraced, the death of their race at their own hands for who but they had the right?

Under siege like never before the eldar fought on through one sorry battle after another, gradually loosing ground as an uncaring galaxy punished their dwindling race relentlessly. Most, if not all, of the exodite worlds were either abandoned or obliterated as the Orks required staging posts, breeding grounds and fresh materials for the WAAAAAAGH! against the emerging necrontyr star-kingdoms and the great devourer and worse.

The suicide cults became murder cults as new souls were offered up to the god of death and the absent god of murder for any form of deliverance from a galaxy of horrors unrelenting. Nurgle fed well off of the despair of a dying race and many felt his touch and embraced him as an end to their suffering at the cost of suffering to others. Cults of murder and despair fought one another in the streets and often those following the Path of the Warrior had to be called in to help restore order. As time went on it looked like the craftworlds had become a twisted parallel to the depravity of the Old Empire they had escaped from so long ago.

It was upon besieged Ulthwe in the year 892M42 that the future of the Eldar began to take shape.

A warband of the 16th Black Crusade in the service of Slaanesh had managed to slip past the Cadian Gate and run amok in an already brutalised galaxy. Sniffing the scent of so many souls so pleasing to their damned patron the blasphemers assailed Ulthwe. The fleets, so diminished in their recent actions against the supply convoys of the Great Despoiler, harassed the on coming ships but to little avail as they were out numbered more than ten to one.

Landing craft fell like a cruel rain of razor blades upon the craftworld, disgorging their murderous cargo to seek out the population centres for their amusement and the delight of their god. The Seers, Farseers and Warlocks directed the servants of Khaine across the skein of fate trying, desperately trying, to find a destiny that ended in something other than the unthinkable tortures at the hand of a mad god of their own making.

Mile by bitter mile the defenders of Ulthwe were driven back as the chaotic forces defiled the sacred ground of the craftworld. The civilians, the injured and the children had been efficiently sheltered in the most heavily fortified of the Ulthwe's strong points; places where the Infinity Circuit was at it's most vulnerable.

At the head of this depraved crusade was the champion of Slaanesh, Fulgrim, Primarch of the Emperor's bastard Children. His serpentine body slithered across the once hallowed ground of Ulthwe and where he touched the grass withered and died. His Laernan blade, last artefact of a dead world and infused with the essence of Slaanesh, cut swathes through the servants of Kaela Mensha Khaine and delivered their souls straight to She Who Thirsts. The howls of utter terror emitting from the burned wreckage of once immortal Exarch warriors was a thing of absolute horror for the children of Isha and the wraithbone heart of the craftworld resonated in sympathy with it.

The nights-cycles of the craftworld became as bright as day from the fires that spread through the parklands, gardens and once grand homes and the daytime was as black as night from the smoke and dust and all pervading were the howls and screams of the dying, the damned and worse.

As the battle lines were driven further and further back the eldar knew their end was near, the metal had hit the meat and they had been found wanting. All they could do was die gloriously and take as many of the heathen cultists with them into the abyss. They vowed to make the unholy abomination rue the day they ever laid eyes upon their space borne home.

As one all the eldar on the craftworld felt a compulsion to turn and look towards the main web-way gate. Like fish in a stranded pool sensing a stream of fresh water they felt a dreadful hope wash over Ulthwe.

Troupe upon troupe of Harlequins poured through the web-way apertures across the doomed world, screaming, giggling and laughing as they danced the dance of death and cut a bloody toll through ranks of the chaos worshipers. Soloists beyond count did battle with the greater deamons of Slaanesh but the danced they danced was a new one and one the deamons knew instinctively and recoiled from in dread. They danced the dance of an unwanted god, cut down in hate and vengeance and disguise to the laughter of the mocking High Avatars and the jubilation the Mimes. As the Dance of the Trickster Triumphant came to a close the deamons were left maimed and dead at their feet and every lesser abomination fell to their knees (or equivalent) in anguish and sorrow and death.

Their god had been murdered and bound as they were they and all those like them across the galaxy were torn apart and fed to the Warp, just as their patron had been.

Across the craftworld deamons died and cultist wept in sorrow. They made easy quarry and were cut down with glee.

One pocket of unholy resistance still endured upon Ulthwe and it was getting dangerously close to the vacant throne of Khaine of the Bloody Hands. Fulgrim, wretched child of the Emperor, endured. His unique xeno blade retained much of its nature and by extension the deamon within it pulling the strings of the Primarch survived and so did his retinue of Emperor's Children. The bone-weary guards of the shrine after so long in unending combat were in no shape to stop him and they struck them down with contemptuous ease. Slithering through the towering iron and brass doors into the shrine of a murdered god of murder he came across something far more vicious; a mortal.

An old eldar man, hideously scared by tortures unimaginable and clad in the burned and torn remnants of a farseers robe. In his hands he held the beaten remains of the Staff of Ulthamar and in his eyes he held a hate that could shatter mountains. The corrupted Astartes were dead before they hit the floor. The old farseer and the fallen Primarch fought with the ferocity of the truly mad. Unholy curses were bellowed at glass shattering volume from the orphaned deamon prince and a broken hymn for broken gods was roared by the oldest farseer there ever was. Step by step the deamon prince was driven out of the temple bleeding from a dozen ragged wounds from a dozen savage blows. The disfigured eldar seemed to know what was sustaining the abomination and with his jagged toothed mouth gaping wide in a predatory grin he lunged at the hand that wielded it and tore the hand from the arm at the wrist.

The deamon that had once been Fulgrim collapsed to the ruined ground clasping its bloody stump of a wrist. And watched in utter despair as the ancient eldar broke the blade over his knee.

Then there was just Fulgrim. The deamon had been dragged back into the abyss after so many long, long millennia. Hope bloomed in the primarch's eyes and withered into ashes in a moment as he realized exactly which farseer had just defeated him. The merciful thing to do would have been to let the broken primarch run as far as possible as a warning to the next ten generation of the folly of attacking the eldar. The old farseer of Ulthwe was not feeling merciful that day and tore out Fulgrim's throat. Eldrad still remembered the death of his old friend Khiraen Goldhelm and revenge was always a dish best served live.

The farseers of Ulthwe, reputed to be the best of their kind, were lost. They had seen the death of their world and the eventual and none too distant extinction of their kind. But now they could not. They could not see anything. The skein of fate had twisted into something unrecognisable and they were travelling through it utterly blind, a sensation akin to falling backwards into deep pit.

As the craftworld addressed the worst of its wounds the farseers met in the Dome of Crystal Seers, as the council halls were all burning, to pool what little knowledge they had on their sudden blindness. Many were the absences for that meeting as all too many lay dead, their bodies unidentifiable and their loss was keenly felt. There was one there who should not have been, or should have been but had been gone or far too long. It was Q'sandria, Champion Warlock of the 14th Black Crusade, who recognized him first and bowed her head in respect and more than a little fear. It was scant few moments before the quicker of the assembled council members came to the same conclusion and they were filled with joy at the return of so talented a farseer but also filled with dread at what he might have brought back with him. They all knew his fate, where he had gone. No one escaped the Realm of Chaos unchanged.

Despite their marginally regained precognitive abilities the Craftworld Eldar had only a few months of warning concerning the collapse of the Imperium. To the Craftworlders not consumed by nihilistic fanaticism the disintegration of the Imperium of Man was a mixed blessing. Gone forever was the threat of extermination at the hands of the Imperial Guard and the abominable Space Marines but so too was gone the barricade of bodies that the Imperium had represented against more monstrous things. Horrors that the galaxy unleashed had no qualms in visiting upon the children of Isha. But Eldrad had a plan.

As the only Farseer with any real capability left Eldrad ordered Autarchs and those who had walked Paths of the Steersman and the Mariner to make preparations to move the craftworld. This was a very unpopular thing to do. The mere thought of the horrors in the Warp caused the eldar to tremble to their very marrow and the idea of trying to send their entire world sized home through it with the Infinity Circuit shining like a beacon and sounding like a dinner bell was abhorrent. There was rioting in the bombed out streets and dissention amongst the usually quite unified temples of the Warrior Path. The council eventually saw sense when the farseers pointed out that death and damnation down this path was merely possible as opposed to remaining still where it was a certainty.

Every Ranger, Pathfinder and Wanderer and all those who trod the Paths of the Outcast and all those privateers and corsairs who still felt some loyalty to their old home were called upon. A great message was sent out across the web-way a call to all true eldar who would hear it. The Infinity Circuit and the souls of the dead that resided therein resonated to the sound of it and so in sympathy did those of far-flung sibling Craftworlds. "Come all ye survivors, it's time to stop running. The new dawn rises".

Great tethers of gravitation and inertial manipulation were strung about Ulthwe by the recalled fleets and wayward children and the battered old craftworld charged up its ancient warp-drives for the first time since The Fall and the days it was once just an overgrown trader vessel.

The sky tore open and the denizens of the warp beheld a banquet of radiant light and unspeakable delicacies and they descended to feast. The Infinity Circuit turned and snarled in response and bared its dreadful fanged maw and the denizens of the Warp fled back to the abyss that spawned them; they were not the pre-eminent predator here.

For a year and a day Ulthwe sailed the currents of the warp. Deamons and warp-spawned filth tried to assail it constantly and were fended off and left mangled in the wake of the titanic constructs passage.

Eventually the sky was torn open again where there was once nothing but empty interstellar void the craftworld set down anchor.

To their dismay they found that they were isolated. Their passage through the Unreal had rearranged the labyrinthine web-way and it had become as alien as the skein of fate now looked. The Harlequins, who seemed to have taken up residence in the outskirts of the craftworld, just laughed when they learned of this. Everyone who had been in the web-way was either now on a craftworld or protected in the Black Library or, if they were exceptionally unlucky, living in the Dark City. Anyone else who was in that strange place was probably an intruder and was almost certainly hopelessly lost beyond any hope of recovery or salvation. Then the laughed some more.

For a brief time Ulthwe existed in utter isolation from the galaxy and the Bonesingers and Artisans of the craftworld tried to rebuild as much as they could in the calm stillness just as those on the Path of the Healer continued to tend the craftworlds injured.

As time passed the Farseers periodically regained their precognitive abilities and began to see a little way into the future with acceptable accuracy and then had their witch-sight blinded over and over again. The future was changing, all the prophecies were dead and the skein of fate was now as alien to them as the web-way had become.

In time other Craftworlds tore free of the sea of souls and sailed towards them with the open arms of long lost siblings and old friends. Saim-Hann was the first to resurface from the depths of the warp; their wild ways had allowed them to almost catch up with Ulthwe. Next were Alaitoc and Telennar whose well-ordered and disciplined citizenry had prepared with commendable speed and efficiency for the dangerous voyage. Altansar came next as they had set off immediately with Maugan Ra at their helm; their people had endured the forces of chaos for longer than any and knew no fear of deamons. Other craftworlds appeared as time passed Zahr-Tann, Luggnath, the isolationists Kaelor and Dorhai, Il-Kaithe, Iybraesil, Mymeara and even the perpetually pessimistic doomed craftworld of Meros. Eventually the near mausoleum of Iyanden arrived with it's pitifully low population of living eldar.

The burning wreckage of Biel-Tan was the last to materialise. They had stubbornly tried to hold on to some of their old Maiden Worlds that had already been claimed in the name of the awakening Necron Lords in an age long since past. Just as they were unhappy to find human colonists upon their paradise worlds so they were burned off of theirs. The Irony was not lost on them, neither was it appreciated when they had it pointed out to them repeatedly.

Most of the craftworlds assembled had long standing grudges and rivalries with near every other craftworld (the big exception being Dorhai whom until this time even the Harlequins had forgotten about) and many had engaged in open war with each other. These craftworlds stared with undisguised detestation across the void between them, but no one dared make the first gesture of conflict as no one was aware of all the alliances and influences that their rivals held and so, with the blinding of the farseers, could not tell who would come out on top if a everything descended into a colossal melee.

It was the Phoenix Lords, contrary to the expectation of many, who initially bullied the councils and governing bodies of the eldar into acting with a unified purpose. They did not desire a mere war; they desired conquest.

It was time the children of Kurnous to stop being the prey. It was time to rebuild the Empire in the power vacuum left in passing of the Imperium.

The use of the webway was out of the question. The movements of the craftworlds had utterly dislocated it and it would take many thousands of years to map it's winding, impossible ways anew. This mattered little to the eldar. She Who Thirsts was dead, the warp was traversable without the threat of utter damnation. Great fleets were sent out from the craftworlds to conquer and subjugate the worlds of the lesser races. On many worlds something strange happened. They joined the Empire willingly as vassal states, subservient and obedient in exchange for protection from a universe of desolation and ruin. The first of these vassal worlds was Praetoria.

Starvation was as rampant in it's streets as pestilence and riots. Without fresh imports of food from the greater Imperium the dwindling stockpiles of provisions had all but been exhausted. The Adeptus Arbiters had been forced to declare martial law and seize direct control of the planet after the massacre of the royal family at the hands of a protest turned violent and the PDF had to be mobilised just to keep the chaos cults from going critical and tearing holes in the firmament. It was into this maelstrom of unrest that the eldar descended and bought the loyalty of the citizenry with the easy to uphold promise of a decent meal at least once every other day. Within a month there was an eldar governor appointed.

This was repeated across hundreds inhabited worlds in the surrounding space with a dozen different sapient species, as all were seen as equally inferior to the children of Isha, and a hundreds more were annihilated and colonised by the eldar master race.

There were exceptions to this pattern of subjugation and conquest. The most prominent being that of N'dras T'au (Know to many as The Last Sept World). Many of the ragged convoys of the Tau found there way to that desolate rock. They landed their ships and burrowed down. So lifeless was the world and so far they had dug they believed themselves beyond all detection. They were wrong. Upon their discovery the eldar allowed them to keep some measure of sovereignty, partly because they were a small group of less than fifty thousand individuals, but mostly because they felt their caste system was a primitive attempt at their own Path System. The sense of vague endearment allowed them a certain level of autonomy within the fledgling Empire and allowed them to stay under the rule of their own Overseer Aun'Va.

The Grand Eldar Empire was the largest xeno empire to emerge from the death of the Old Imperium. It stretched from Calderia in the galactic south to ruins of Pranagar in the north. In the East it stretched far enough to count New Tanith as one of its vassal worlds and far enough west to come into conflict with the Deliverance Alliance.

By the time the Old Imperial calendar ground its way into the early years of the forty-fifth millennium they eldar had some of their old gods back, their Great Enemy slain and an empire that looked poised to claim much of the Segmentum Tempestus, and many welcomed their conquest for the protection they offered.


	5. Death Korps

In the decades preceding to the fall of the Old Imperium the people of Krieg were called upon like never before. Bodies were tithed to the Imperial Guard at a prodigious rate as soldiers were called upon to defend ever-increasing numbers of war-ravaged worlds from increasingly abominable horrors. The artificial-womb shrines, so lovingly maintained in slumber by the Adeptus Biologicus, were awoken and once more the ordered ranks of glass containers bore ordered ranks of fresh human meat to become ordered ranks of grim soldiers for the Death Korps.

Legion upon legion of humans born to unknown parents and child to the machine were raised in the certainty that their only reason to be was to die under alien stars. And die they did but not without cost upon a hundred worlds, their grim acceptance and determination terrifying their allies almost as much as their enemies.

From the devastation at the Cadian Gate to the far-flung Realm of Ultramar the joyless children of Krieg could be found holding the line unflinchingly against things that stripped sanity from the minds of even Space Marines. They fought without passion or vehemence and although they could be cut down they could never be broken.

But the cost of such a formidable bulwark against the night was a steep one for the Motherworld Krieg. The whole industry of the planetary system was given over to the creation of these supreme soldiers at the cost of all else and desolate Krieg became increasingly reliant upon imports of food and industrial products from the greater Imperium. The sin of over-specialisation and dependency on others was to cost them dear.

The Governor Militant of Krieg, although lacking in compassion and any creativity outside of warfare, was not a fool and had recognised their increasing dependency on off-world imports and had taken the only means he had to limit the damage. The great stockpiles, first horded by their ancestors prior to the 500-year nuclear civil war and dutifully maintained by the generations that followed, were increased ten fold and more in constant preparation for any possible siege.

On the night the Emperor died the Kriegers remained undaunted, nothing ever fazed the Kriegers. The galaxy over the Death Korps simply did what they had been programmed to do in any great emergency, dig in and hold out as long as possible. This was exactly what they did. On some worlds it was only the presence of the vat-grown soldiers that dragged societies back towards chilly sanity, on too many it was not enough. Reports concerning the actions of the Death Korps in those harrowing days became the stuff of legends in later years that inspired the survivors on those hundreds of far flung worlds to carve legends of their own.

On Tregon Marus it was claimed that men and women of the Death Korps had charged over the broken bodies of slaughtered Grey Knights and killed the gloating deamon M'kar with their bayonets affixed and all their grenades unpinned. On Armageddon two squads of Kriegers held the main gate of Hades Hive for a day and a night against the World Eaters during the 5th Great War for Armageddon before reinforcements from the Steel Legion arrived. On the arid wasteland of Tellaran it was said that the last living thing on that world were the few survivors of the Death Korps, holding the line before the star port, so that the just one more shuttle of women and children could escape the tide of deamons. On the industrial hellhole Triplex Phall once a local year, every year, there is a moment of silence for the vat-grown soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice to hold the Obliterators at bay just long enough for the Skitarii Regiments to surround the chaos touched techno-abominations.

But all these feats of heroism were of no benefit to the home they had left behind them, cut off as it was by many a perilous light-year.

The loyalty of Krieg was proverbially beyond question, if only because most of its denizens were almost entirely incapable of asking such questions. The loyalty of the cultures in many of the surrounding stellar systems was regrettably rather more fluid.

The seven nearest humanly inhabited systems surrounding Krieg had been infiltrated by the warrior brotherhoods of the Deamon Prince Gorephage, blessed of Khorne. Showing uncommon guile and patience for one of his type Gorephage seeded his cults across the seven systems hundreds of years before fall of the Imperium. With a dark cunning his disciples wormed their way into positions of authority within the military structures of their home systems. The death scream of the Emperor was the signal the had been waiting for and across light-years rebellions arose in the ranks of the PDFs and mutinies turned the deck plates red in the fleets of the SDF. In a single night of treachery the seven systems surrounding Krieg tore down the Aquilla and rose in its place the mark of the Blood God.

There was no rebellion on the motherworld. The Kriegers had no vices to exploit, no bloodlust to manipulate and no dark hunger to sate. Their brutally simplistic social order was one of duty and obedience and nothing more. Krieg would have made Gorephage's domain number eight worlds, a number favoured by his patron, but he had been denied and his rage was terrible.

Great fleets were made ready and blood-drenched regiments were raised, sorcerers ware called forth and daemons were summoned and bound. Those who would not swear loyalty to the Brass and Bone throne of the Blood God but were unworthy to be killed were enslaved in the mines, the farms and the manuractoriums to provide the raw materials and food for the armies of domination and damnation. But one ship, worn and tattered as it was, slipped away unnoticed from the growing armada.

From the Duranus system, prior to the death of the Emperor, there had been a call for aid in the systems defence against the orks of the Warboss Ugruk Harteata. This call for aid had been answered by, amongst others, two companies of the Steel Confessors and one company of Mortificators. The war was over quickly as the warboss was not such a brilliant tactician and a great victory celebration was had in the planets capital city, much to the annoyance of the Steel Confessors and Mortificators who were misanthropic and extremely dour respectively. Just as the celebrations were concluding and the Space Marines were getting ready to charge up their warp-drives and leave their navigators were struck blind, their astropaths dropped dead and in less than an hour a garbled distress signal was transmitted.

Descending back to Duranus Principa they immediately came under attack from soldiers they had once called allies. In less than a week the Astartes were, between them, down to just over a full company worth of combatants and only one strike cruiser, Daughter of Iron. They were forced to endure the shame of retreat and hid in the deep orbits far from the light of the local sun, occasionally they would launch a raid on the local in-system ships for the parts needed to repair their own beaten vessel but for the most part they waited.

Before too long Duranus became the staging post for an immense armada and from eavesdropping on the communications, both psychic and radio, the Astartes learned of their target; Krieg. Without hesitation the crudely repaired strike cruiser engaged its patched up warp-drive and as best they could without the astronomican set sail.

The journey was not a smooth one and on two occasions there were deamonic manifestations. The voyage took may years and half the serfs that saw the journeys end were born during transit, grew up and inherited the jobs of their aging forebears. Time was against them in a literal way as they tore through the sea of souls as fast as their engines could carry them.

The denizens of Krieg were overjoyed, although it was hard to tell, at the arrival of the Daughter of Iron. It had been the better part of a year and they had had not so much as a Navis message boat visit them. To compound their growing feeling of utter isolation all their specially trained psykers could hear was a great roaring of some sort of great predator beast where once would have been the murmured whisperings of a busy Imperium.

Their joy turned back into its usual cold acceptance when the Astartes informed them of all that they had witnessed. They each confirmed the others mutual suspicions and dread, the Emperor was gone and the Imperium had fallen.

The already fortified world was fortified some more. Great subterranean vaults were dug miles below the blasted surface, bunkers were hewn from uncaring rocks, watch towers were built, surveillance satellites were seeded across the system to watch for any signs of the oncoming armada, surface to space missile silos were dug out and great void shield generators were constructed in the most vulnerable of settlements. The soldiers, now unhappily idle with no wars to fight, were loaned to the mechanicus enclaves on their worlds to increase the production of munitions and weapons and all manner of war gear. The Daughter of Iron was repaired as best as the Kriegers could manage and fresh mariners were loaned from the Krieg SDF to replenish the depleted crew.

The Astartes broke themselves up and spread their numbers thinly across the surface of that barren old rock and across the boarding teams of the SDF.

It was not long of waiting before the first ships of the armada translated into the materium. The defending fleet had stationed themselves at the most likely and safe translation points deep in the void and far from any major gravity wells. The fleet translated almost in low orbit of Krieg, protected from the danger of gravitation in the translation by their patron deity. The SDF fleets turned at burned towards the motherworld as fast as they could but they knew it could take weeks and in some cases months to make it home. The relatively few ships in near-Krieg space put up a brave fight but were nevertheless destroyed or forced to flee, crippled and burning, into deeper space.

The drop pods and landing craft of the armada fell like a poison rain that would never end. Most of the major cities were protected by great void shields and antiaircraft guns and it became necessary for the attackers to move on foot or in APCs to invade them. Battles raged in the streets as deamonic constructs blasted the fortified city walls to cinders and ash and there the Kriegers drove them back again and again and made them pay with blood and sweat and tears for every inch of ground they gained. Through burned out homes and bombed out streets and ruined temples and training grounds they fell back in ever harder rings of defence and defiance and still the unholy ranks of the attackers were bolstered by fresh reinforcements. It was into this bloodbath that the Traitor Astartes descended. From multiple legions and chapters all united in their desire to taste blood and claim skulls and this they most assuredly did and no mercy did they show for the denizens of the dead world they walked upon.

The off-world colonies of the Krieg system fared no better. Most had been abandoned and the populations moved to more defendable settlements, some had been too remote and had been massacred down to the last man, woman and child. The SDF ships had been closer to these worlds out in the further orbits and had at least been able to offer some protection.

For months the Kriegers held onto their cities and were ground back relentlessly into smaller and smaller pockets of resistance as the body counts grew more sorrowful. Seemingly simultaneously across the globe the line broke and the besieged Kriegers fled in full and frantic retreat to the undercities, underground transit systems and bunkers. But it was all a ploy.

The ancient children of Mother Krieg had dug deep and far in the five-century nuclear war and although the tunnels had been all but abandoned in the many, many years that followed they had never been destroyed. In preparation for the oncoming storm they were currently enduring the old tunnels had been made habitable once more and extended massively.

As the hordes of damnation surged forth into the conquered cities of Krieg and raised their banners high on prominent and iconic landmarks the trap was sprung. Great mushroom clouds of atomic death once more graced the skies and vaporised quite an appreciable fraction of the invasion force. Radiation poisoned the air and the land and the dark seas of Krieg once more, but the natives did not care. Deep in their tunnels and vaults and bunkers under miles upon miles of solid rock they were relatively safe. Further more the great stockpiles were in the very deepest and safest subterranean vaults.

The last message sent from the Governors Bunkers was as simple and short message ordering all the SDF ships to fall back, protect the outer colonies and stay safe.

It was said that the screams of frustration and rage that Gorephage roared could be heard even under so much rock and rubble. The Death Korps grinned in the darkness behind their perpetually worn gas masks. That Gorephage had thought to invade their world and expect such a quick and easy victory was arrogance and stupidity rolled up in one efficient package. That he thought their casualties would unduly bother them showed he did not know them. They were the Death Korps, born to no parents, child to the machine, without names to put on graves so none could ever mourn them, their only reason to live was to die.

The Mortificators and the Steel Confessors, as they hid so far from the light, came to the realisation that even they, post-human, aloof, uncaring and cold though they were were far more human than the monsters they shared the tunnels with. A few even came to suspect that even the currently stunned legion of damnation out on the surface were more human that their allies. It was said that Astartes knew no fear; the Death Korps unleashed terrified them to their marrow.

The Decade of a Hundred Incursions had begun and every time the armies of Gorephage landed upon that irradiated ground they were butchered to the last man, woman and thing. No prisoners, no mercy and no respite. The Kriegers had gone underground and struck from seemingly everywhere at once. Regiments and warbands would camp for the night and hear nothing but the screams of their patrol squads and lookouts and find nothing but corpses cut to bloody ribbons in acts of cold sadism. Only the foolhardy and suicidal followed the Death Korps into the tunnels, and none ever came back.

The Traitor Astartes had been whittled down to half their number when the atomics went off, as they were at the head of the assaults on the fortified cities. They didn't even survive the subsequent five years. Some said the Death Korps held a special dislike for them above all others, but it was mostly because the Mortificators and Steel Confessors needed spare parts for their weapons and armour.

The seven systems of Gorphage's little empire were bled white as more and more troops and resources were called upon to crush this little world that had so defied him. Eventually he was forced to visit Krieg in person.

At the head of a great army of deamons and possessed oblitorators he strode across the surface of Krieg. It was he and his diabolical warhost that first managed to make any headway into the tunnels. He cut through the subterranean defenders and his unholy armies did paint the wall red with their blood. But the Death Korps fought back. Gorephage knew all about rage and wroth but after fighting the Death Korps he learned to hate as well. He fought for in adoration of his patron, he fought with bloodlust and passion and religious fervour and so did all his soldiers and disciples. Such things were pleasing to Khorne regardless of their source. But the Kriegers were blasphemers of the highest order. They fought without passion or bloodlust or anger or hope or any real emotion. They fought with discipline and cold passionless efficiency that was anathema to Khorne. Gorephage hated Krieg and all her bastard children.

For years Gorphage roared through the tunnels, his armies constantly assailed from all angles and reinforcements having to be constantly sent for. For years he beat down doors and butchered soldiers and even as they were dying in their droves he seldom been even able to feel the slightest flicker of fear from his victims and he wished the same could be said for his own army.

And the tunnels seemed to be tunnels without end that branched off in every direction. It seemed as if the whole planet had been hollowed out just to spite him.

Eventually Gorephage, not without considerable cost, did manage to find the command bunker beneath thirty miles of bedrock and an eternity of wandering. With a mighty blow from his corrupted deamonhammer the adamantine door was reduced to shards. The room was empty, save for one old man in a general's uniform. The old man nodded in recognition of his adversary and then let go of the dead-mans trigger he had been holding. So far down there was no great column of atomic flame or impressive mushroom cloud but the ground did shake for quite some distance in every direction.

Gorephage had been defeated and in less than a year the squabbling disciples he had raised to command his legions were hunted down and wiped out.

The ships of the system defence force boarded many of the ships of the invading armada and the Astartes held themselves with distinction in theses engagements. The mechanicus took what uncorrupted equipment and materials they could from these stricken vessels and, after the proper purification and decontamination rituals, used them to repair their own ships. More importantly the warp-drives and geller-field generators were salvaged and the SDF became the Krieg Navy.

The counter invasion had begun.

Bled of anything of value as they were the seven systems of Gorphage's little empire were no match for the grim soldiers of the Death Korps. Duranus Principa was the first world to be conquered with merciless efficiency and its agricultural land was seen a divine providence by the Death Korps whose great stockpiles were at last beginning to run a little low. The slaves were freed and the slavers were killed and much was salvaged.

Duranus became a rallying call for the slaves of the other six systems and the invasion of the Death Korps was made all the easier by the mass rebellions and uprisings. The Kriegers fortified each new world to the insane degree of the motherworld before they left and all had a standing garrison of the 'Grim Protectors', as the locals came to know them.

Thirty years after the death of the Emperor the Eight Fortress Worlds of Krieg were complete and Mother Krieg was rebuilt to her former sorrowful glory.

The remnants of the Steel Confessors and Mortificators companies eventually amalgamated into the Krieg Marines and were given recruitment rights from the vats of the motherworld. Neither company could go home, and some even believed there was probably no home to go to, so they made that grim hated ball of irradiated rock their home. The Daughter of Iron became their undersized battle-barge.

For the Kriegers it was a golden age. They had become loved, in a distant and slightly scared way, by those they had liberated and the new worlds they had conquered were made as safe and well protected as their motherworld, but far more full of life and happiness. To them it was Eden.

The Fortress Worlds was one of the most well defended empires to come out of the death of the Old Imperium. Formidable though its military was it was never an aggressive empire and only conquered the worlds that had launched attacks on it first. In the early days there were no shortage of these but after the next few little empires were assimilated the galaxy seemed to learn.

By year 001M45 the Fortress Worlds consisted of forty-nine constituent solar systems and over a hundred self-sustaining inhabited planets. It was never an easy place to live and society expected much from its citizens but in return it no citizen had to starve or feel fear other than the sort habitually felt in the presence of the Grim Protectors.


	6. Fall and Rise of Ultramar

Across the Eastern Fringe as Necrons arose from their eons of slumber and Tyranid hordes stormed over the picked over bones of the Tau Empire, Orks arose and the hyper-violent Barghesi broke free from their containment around the Grendl Stars and a hundred thousand worlds burned in apocalyptic holocaust that made the Age of Strife look sedate. Lives were snuffed out by the billion but some endured.

Ultramar, once a great hub of commerce and culture on the Eastern Fringe whose borders encompassed a thousand worlds below the ever-watchful Aquilla. They were the bulwark upon which the Tyranids were first bested, the rock in the tempest that endured. Hive Fleet Behemoth was dead, its body strewn across a thousand worlds, but they were just the advanced scouts.

The unleashing of the much feared Barghesi into the galaxy bought Imperial stability in that region some time as the Iron Lords, reasoning that the Hive Fleet Kraken acquiring that accursed biological potential was now just a matter of time, directed the murderous xenos straight into the path of the dread star locust. This bought them the time they needed to requisition every warp-capable vessel for light years around and abandon and evacuate their homeworld of Sternac before the arrival of the extra-galactic hunger.

To compound matters the Orks were becoming suspiciously well organised. Their predations were mostly visited upon the Tyranid hordes (Dems gud eatin' Boyz!) and the Necron Horrors around whom they seemed to drop their happy-go-lucky demeanour. They recognised them, after all the countless ages they recognised the Cold Ones. But their attentions were not wholly concerned with xenocide, they raided and plundered the human worlds harshly, they needed supplies for "Da WAAAAAAAGH! efurt".

Riddled with strife from both within and without the rule of Macragge was beginning to crumble and order dissolve as seditious elements within many of the planetary governments took this opportunity of discord to try and carve out petty little empires of their own only to be struck down by outside forces they could not endure against alone or the thunderous power fists of more worthy authority.

In the dawning of the Age of Unreason the Ultramarines were tried like never before. In the decades and centuries leading up to the collapse of the Imperium the great wars had been waged and great losses had been suffered. In the increasingly dark days since the dying of M41 it seemed that all of the great heroes of the chapter had passed away leaving nothing but despair in their passing.

A runaway veteran Vindicare Assassin, half crazed on combat-stimms and crazed the rest of the way by the horrors he had witnessed in his long life, put a bullet through the cranium of Captain Antilochus of the tenth company in the year 555M42. His death allowed the promotion of Torias Telion to the rank of Captain, a rank he did not want but accepted for concern of what incompetence other may perpetrate in his place.

Chapter Master Marneus Augustus Calgar fell in the year 998M42 in the ruins of Hive Helsreach on Armageddon in mortal combat with the Warboss Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, by his sacrifice the Beast of Armageddon was slaughtered and the Fourth Great War brought to a much swifter end.

Severus Agemman of the first company was promoted to the rank of Chapter Master after the death of Calgar and held that post for a mere twenty years before he was critically injured in a boarding action against the great ships of Hive Fleet Dagon. They had been attempting to plant nuclear warheads within the ship as it slumbered its way to the next killing ground, a tactic that had worked for him in the past. Regrettably the Hive Mind had learned to place sentries to awaken the rest of the brood in such circumstances. Chapter Master Agemman was placed in a Dreadnaught shell and continues to serve even in death. He takes some comfort in that the mission that was responsible for his demise was ultimately successful.

Captains Mikael Fabian, Epathus and Ixion were slain when they attempted to put the Necron Star-Kingdom that were awakening on the northern border or Ultramar back into the grave. This was ultimately unsuccessful and only seventy-three battle brothers returned to the chapter from a force of near three-hundred and twenty. Their sacrifice was not totally in vain as the distraction the devastation they wrought gave the worlds along the northern border ample time to prepare for the worst of the onslaught that was to follow. Whether Chapter Master Cato Sicarius sent them on such a mission knowing that they were doomed and spending their lives simply to buy time (and eliminates voices of discontent to his rise to eminence) is unknown and none dare ask for fear of the answer they may receive.

Captain Uriel Ventris of the fourth company, The Spear of Macragge Antaro Chronus and Chief Librarian Varro Tigurius were present at the cleansing of the moon systems of Circe. The gene-stealers left in the wake of Hive Fleet Behemoth, and later corrupted by the warp exposure of detonated warp-cores, had turned that once prosperous collection of moons into a festering nightmarish hell-hole of monstrosities where the difference between corrupted xeno and escaped warp denizen became utterly blurred. The fourth company, along with elements of several others, descended into the increasingly infernal hellscape with fire in their hearts and prayers on their lips. Reality eventually reasserted itself across those ruined globes and were, some considerable quarantine time latter, resettled. Of the Ultramarines there was no sign.

Captains Sinon and Numitor and Master of sanctity Ortan Cassius were part of an attack force sent to disrupt the increasing organisation of the Ork Empire of Charadon. Although they succeeded in doing so only a handful of the attacking force survived. The body of Ortan Cassius was reverentially placed in the Temple of Correction, his armour and Crozius Arcanum were passed on to his successor just as they had been passed on to him.

Lord Admiral Lazlo Tiberius became one of those most rare of creatures; a space marine that grew too old to tread the warpath. His increasingly ancient and failing body eventually began to reject any form of longevity treatment and eventually began to fail entirely. Chapter Master Cato Sicarius was unwilling to let such formidable knowledge and instinctive understanding of void warfare fall into the grave and Lazlo Tiberius refused to simply die from something so ignoble as age whilst there were still foes to best. Using a mind-to-machine interface not too dissimilar to the sort used in Titans and the near ruined shell of deceased dreadnaught Serverus the Lord Admiral Lazlo Tiberius, Master of the Fleet, was hard-wired into the strike cruiser Vae Victus. With Skin of alloy and wings of fusion flame he now perceives the galaxy with a new awareness in a superior body.

The day the Astronomican went dark was a day of panic and confusion across the entire realm, riots and disturbance was rife as nihilistic suicide cults of despair sprung up across the worlds. And why should they not? Who could have committed a greater sin than to outlive God?

The Ultramarines by the mid point of M43 were nothing but a shadow of their former magnificence. The chapter was just under half strength and their realm was burning. Great armies of destruction, subjugation and damnation were amassing on every border and the light of Terra had been put out. But they were Ultramarines, proud progeny of Gulliman, they would not be dragged quietly into the abyss. Every world in the realm regardless of distance from areas of active conflict was ordered to adopt a war economy. Rationing was put into effect, conscription was enforced and increased, stockpiles of ammunition, spare weapons, fuel, medical supplies, food and water were hoarded.

Many worlds, or at least the governing authorities of many worlds, objected to this loss of personal freedoms at the hands of those that had sworn to protect them. Many of the Ultramarines resented the needful yet cruel task of bringing the errant world back into line by the most brutal and expedient ways possible.

Worlds were prepared and regiments were mobilised and fleets were constructed with enviable efficiency as the wars escalated and things came over the border that had no reason beyond the murder of worlds and sanity. The displaced refugees from the systems surrounding the outskirts of Ultramar were actually of some benefit as the billions of displaced and hopeless proved viable replacement populations for war depleted worlds.

Across the weary light-years, bereft of the Guiding Light to see by, navigators groped in the dark where once was light to steer by. But blind they most certainly were not. After the initial surge of mostly civilian refugees from the nearby systems of near-Ultramar space came the steady stream of the lost, forsaken and exiled. Upon the Eastern fringe Ultramar had always been seen as the greatest beacon of hope and civilisation and so it was this light that the navigators set their threadbare sails for.

But it was not just the broken spirits of refugees that sought solace behind the borders of Gulliman's realm. With no home to rebuild upon and no friendly port to shelter in the wandering children of Gulliman turned to their ancestral home for spiritual guidance.

Chapter Master Sicarius saw this for the blessing that it was. Recent conflicts all across the rimwards edge of his empire against the Great Devourer had been gradually depleting his chapter or resources, ships, serfs and brothers and these brothers in arms could be just what he needed to give his chapter the breathing space to replenish the ranks. Given the nature of inter-stellar travel at this time with the loss of the Astronomican, the death of the astropaths and the fact that most of these chapters were spread thinly across the galactic disc with no way of communicating with their distant brothers most of the forces that arrived did not do so in any unified manner. Elements of the Silver Eagles were the first to arrive for the simple reason that they were the closet to the border when Old Night rolled back across the stars. Not far behind them, although approaching from the opposite direction, was the last surviving squad of the Scythes of the Emperor.

The tragic Scythes, since the destruction of their homeworld, had been trying to claim vengeance upon the Hive Fleets at the cost of all else. Their numbers had been driven so low that it would be impractical for the Imperium to offer them any help in rebuilding their chapter and so were left to dwindle away or go on one last charge into death and glory, the two traditional ends to chapters whose time was up. But they refused. With the last surviving ships from their fleet they trailed the Hive Fleets. They watched and listened and leaned all that they could from the extra-galactic hunger. They made lightning raids on the flanks and rear of the fleets and stealthy boarding actions to take live specimens to dissect and learn from. Their findings they shared amongst their brothers in the Astartes and their allies in the Mechanicus and anyone else who might ever make use of them. For centuries they took turns in cryo-coffins to minimise their psychic signatures and hide from the Devourer and in so doing seemed to live far longer than they had any right to. They killed and slaughtered far beyond any expectation their meagre numbers would suggest but time and attrition could not be ignored. As the decades turned into centuries and the centuries grew in number their own numbers diminished till only enough to make up a single full squad remained.

They arrived at the realm of Ultramar at the tail of a great fleet of tyranids they had been using to test their latest combination of toxins and biological contagions upon. At first the Ultramarines were wary of them for they had forsaken the codex in their quest for vengeance but in time they were accepted for their expertise and experience in the arts of tyranic genocide.

In dribs and drabs elements of other chapters arrived. Some were whole companies set adrift on distant missions from worlds now to distant to ever return home, others were the majority of chapters whose masters and command staff had made a careful choice and decided to return to the home of their ancestral Legion in hope of some sort of divine inspiration.

Resources and people were loaned from some of the more prosperous worlds to allow the wanderers to rebuild their fleets and replenish their ranks and this they most assuredly did. With the worlds of his realm defended by his distant cousins the Ultramarines were given time to address their own wounds and rebuild their defences. With the combined might of the sons of Gulliman the advances of the silver holocaust, green horde and great devourer were slowed down as lightning strikes across the stars crippled invading forces to be ground down by the war weary Guard Regiments.

In the decades that followed the fleet-based chapters recovered their numbers with admirable speed and efficiency. Their new recruits were never given any leeway, despite the desperation of the chapter collective, in their ascensions to full brotherhood status. Indeed, many, as mere neophytes, were thrown into the crucible of war against the myriad threats to the realm as a most brutal right of passage. They were once more forces to be reckoned with and their gratitude to their brothers from the worlds of their progenitors would be eternal, but they had to leave. No chapter could endure the rule of another; the very concept was both abhorrent to their inhumanly proud minds and counter to the Codex.

As they made ready to leave the Chapter Master of the Ultramarines was struck with a dilemma. He knew full well that if they were to leave that his realm would once again suffer and wither under the predations of the horrors that were even now only barely being held at bay by their collective effort. But the Codex was clear, no man should have authority over multiple chapters for fear of another Horus arising and for the wanderers to stay in his realm would mean just that.

It was Captain Telion of the tenth company that suggested the answer. Worlds upon the periphery of Ultramar would be the first to fall. They could not, without the aid of their Space Marine brothers, endure. If the acceptance of these worlds as lost was to be inevitable then it would be better to give them to another to rule whilst they were still worth having. The down side to this would be their loss to the Realm of Ultramar and all the resources they might contain.

This offer was never made to those few chapters descended from the stock of other Primarchs that took shelter in Ultramar at that time.

Across the length and breadth of the realm worlds were given away as bargaining pieces to anchor the migrant chapters to troublesome patches of space and act as formidable bulwarks against the on coming storm. Whole planetary systems in an age past conquered by the progenitor Gulliman were bartered for the protection of inhuman post-humans and the protection they could offer. As the number of chapters preparing to depart grew so did the number of systems that had to be given away. The formally crusading chapters knew exactly how they were being manipulated and bribed but on the whole did not care as the gift of a whole planetary system to care for and protect was too generous to refuse. As the number of departing chapters increased the Empire of Ultramar began to run out of systems populous enough to sustain a whole space marine chapter and Chapter Master Sicarius was forced to relinquish jurisdiction over multiple lesser systems to keep his distant siblings anchored.

This was essentially the end of the Empire of Ultramar as any sort of unified body. The Ultramarines willingly carved up their territory into hundreds of fiefdoms, domains and petty states independent from the rule of Macragge and entrusted them to the care of their siblings. Each system was ruled under its own laws, its own codes of morality and honour and was defended by its own armies.

In the latter days of M43 cooperation was essential to the survival of these neighbouring realms. Few had the means to be wholly self-sufficient and those that did seldom had the manpower to spare for any formidable standing army. Of course this changed within less than two centuries as each world, at the behest of their new overlords, made efforts to address their own weaknesses. In those early days the inhumanly proud warriors were forced by random circumstance to rely on each other where before they had been laws unto themselves. This sense of community and kinship was to be vital in the conflicts to follow.

During these reformations to the Realm of Ultramar the forces levelled against them just across the border were never quiet. There were the ever-present skirmishes with the Green Horde and the lords of the silver holocaust constantly sent raiders against the seemingly weakest links in the Ultramar defences, their use of the Dolman Gates allowing them to strike where they pleased with no warning. In these days the children of Gulliman learned to stand together against common foes and great pacts were made with each other to unite them in the common cause; survival.

This was the rebirth of the realm into the Ultramar Commonality.

It was just as well that the pacts were signed when they were as the Dread Star Locust had just finished picking the Tau Empire out of its teeth and was pushing through the whole breadth of the eastern fringe like a tide that would not go out. Whole petty empires were overwhelmed and consumed like the sept worlds before them to further bolster the ranks of the extra-galactic hunger. It was upon the eastern most border-world of the Ultramar Commonality that the hive-fleets first found some real gristle in their banquet.

The Scythes of the Emperor, long ago forsaken by the Old Imperium, had not been so casually tossed aside by their progenitors. The last few carriers of their chapter's honour had requested the right to rebuild in this new and dreadful age and it had been granted. They had chosen a world as far east as they could find in the utter certainty that it would be the first to encounter their ancient nemesis. They had not been disappointed. The world had been an uninhabitable toxic ball of rock with no name and only a Mechanicus ident-code. They named it Giants Coffin in remembrance of a battle that had so shaped their history. They dug out subterranean farm land warmed with the loving but artificial light of giant halogen bulbs powered by the heart of their new world.

Giants Coffin was nothing more than a colossal planetary trap. It was, at one and the same time, a feast of bio-matter and utterly deadly. The surface was a toxic soup of ammonia and sulphides and arsenic whilst below the ground were carefully segmented caverns of vibrant and beautiful farmlands and parklands and well-ordered and easily defendable settlements and great bastion cities.

Giants Coffin ate the first tendril fleet whole with astonishingly minimal losses. The last surviving Librarian of the original scythes had trained a circle of acolytes and apprentices from the psychic residents of his new world and with them he unleashed his most insidious weapon. Long ago their research had confirmed the hive-fleets were being drawn to Astronomican of Old Earth, long ago they had dissected and studied innumerable patriarchs and pure-strains and even the occasional magos of the gene-stealer cult and noted the similarities that the Astronomican and their own psychic beacons shared. The Librarian, boosted by his psyker court, began to shine out and call more of the monsters to his world. As moths to a flame the Tyranids paid heed the call and descended to feast.

The Scythes retained the honour of being the only chapter not to require any sort of aid whilst weathering the Great Tyranid War, as it latter became known.

Across the entire eastern border and coming from both above and bellow the galactic disc the tyranids besieged the Ultramar Commonality.

Chapter Master Sicarius, who was probably more machine than man by this point, was seen as a great negotiator and the voice of reason between the Chapters of the Commonality. Were it not for him the chapters would not have integrated their strategies and tactics so well with the Imperial Guard regiments and even with each other as each brotherhood seemed, to his old and experienced eye, to face the oncoming war with rather more enthusiasm than was required and a little less consideration than was necessary. Cato Sicarius was not the man he once was. Once upon a time little else drove him other then ambition and pride. His desire to rule and his want for power was gone. He had inherited a chapter beaten and blooded by too many conflicts with no time to recover and had watched his world collapse and keep on collapsing until hardly anything was left unbroken. He was inhumanly weary from far too many centuries of constant conflict darting from one emergency to another. His ambition and lust for authority had proven to be utterly hollow and all that sustained him now was his pride and his duty. He would not be remembered as the man who let uncountable millennia of endurance slip into the grave.

A grim and terrible figure, it was the Ultramarines Chapter master who convinced, bullied and negotiated with the myriad disparate chapters into acting with unified purpose as they persecuted their war. By his cunning and his experience gained over an insanely long and bloody life that proved decisive in many of the victories and took the worst of the bite out of many of the defeats.

Sicarius had not been blind to events beyond his borders. He knew all the great atrocities that the hive-mind had perpetrated. He had witnessed the fall of the Tau Empire observed the constant deadlock with which they fought the Ork Horde. The death of xeno at the hand of xeno was not something he was going to shed a tear and all it did was stiffen his resolve; Ultramar would not follow the Tau Empire.

In this time of trial the other foes of Ultramar were not quiet and great battles were fought on other fronts to secure worlds against the barbaric orks, Dark Eldar raids and the omnipresent threat of necron incursions. It was in one such necron incursion that the old near-ghost Torias Telion finally met his end. Despite the attention of those in authority being drawn elsewhere there was no real increase in chaos cult activity. Many attributed this to the extraordinary effort being put into the war effort by the Adeptus Arbiters in their attempts to keep society functioning to support the bulwark of soldiery that was defending them, it would be wrong to say that they did not contribute heavily but it was not the whole truth. The cults, even those established centuries and even millennia before, were in just as much if not more trouble than the rest of society. With a clear and very real threat of extermination the minds and will of the populous was focused, utterly focused, in securing the realm. They took pride in their continued endurance, as they rightly should. Everybody had a purpose and hard though it might be everybody felt wanted. The old member blessed by their patrons with longevity endured but finding willing recruits became a near impossibility.

Year after year, decade beyond decade the Great Tyranid war endured. Worlds were lost in mere days as populations were butchered and then recaptured in resettled in mere weeks as the chitinous swarm was drven out again and again and again.

Across the entirety of the Eastern Fringe well beyond the bounds of Ultramar this same dance of aggression, attrition and mutually attempted annihilation was carried out again and again and again. The Orks in their strongholds were in some sort of religious rapture as Gork and Mork seemed to supply them with more opponents to fight than they could ever of dreamed of, two tides of innumerable foes locked in a battle of attrition that could seemingly have no end, good practice for the real fight.

The Necrontyr in their ascending star-kingdoms were similarly beseeched. On those worlds they had staked a claim to with minimal contestation they began to remould into vision of the worlds they remembered and much terraforming was committed. These gardens of the immortals were seen as delicious to the Dread Star Locust. The expansion of the star-kingdoms was put on hold as they got bogged down in a war their relatively meagre numbers were ill suited for.

The Tyranid hive-mind was driven to war without end as its inherent programming proved ill equipped to deal with such tenacious foes and responded in the only way it knew how; throw more drones at it. Possibly, at some earlier point, it may have been possible for the hive fleet to leave the galaxy, to scurry on by and try its luck in another feeding ground where the food wasn't quite so poisonous and barbed. But it had committed too much of its resources now. There was too much of a chance that it would starve to death in the inter-galactic void without recuperating some of its losses, it was stranded and followed the only path it had left it could comprehend.

The war continued. It seemed a war eternal.

It was the start of 867M44. The Tyranids fought and they fought hard and the Commonality was on its knees. A battered old realm that had endured too much for too long. Its population had long ago given up on hope and dreams of glory or salvation and the grey-faced workforce and soldiery drudged on with solemn acceptance. Even the Space Marines seemed to loose their passion and their fire at the concept of a war without victory, forever. But the attacks seemed, as that year flicked onto the calendar, to diminish. The tide of horror had grown ragged and the attacks became increasingly sporadic. Hope began to bloom in the hearts of humanity once more. Just a little further the librarians and the psykers and the preachers claimed, just a little longer to endure. 931M44 and the attacks had all but ground to a halt. Stragglers of the hive fleet were all that remained, little splinters reminiscent of weedier remnants of hive fleet Behemoth from an age now all but forgotten trying to find softer targets and stave off its own extinction just one more cycle. The predators were now the quarry and no mercy was shown them at all.

The Commonality was jubilant and began the slow and measured process of rebuilding. On many worlds the citizenry were oddly grateful for the mountains of carcases as they could be ploughed back into the ruined soil and return some of its stolen vitality.

The Silver Holocaust and the Green Tide and the Uprising of Damnation (not to mention some other, lesser empires arising on the border) continued to plague the Commonality but the worst of it was over.

In the year 001M45 the body of Cato Sicarius, pushed long past its point of endurance, finally ceased to function. He was on old legend that had lived long past his time and it was some comfort to him that he had lived long enough to see his realm survive the Second Age of Strife and become one of the prominent powers on the eastern fringe.

His body was harvested and taken to the Temple of Correction.


	7. Murder of Crows

The children of Corax had always been victims of their progenitors misguided tampering. With twisted gene-coded they endured well enough across the ages and fought valiantly in the defence of an increasingly desperate Imperium.

As the centuries passed there were always rumours that their gene-stock was gradually degrading further and recruitments were becoming increasingly fraught with medical complications. For the most part this was just the hearsay and slander spouted by their detractors in vain efforts to discredit a proud progeny.

Until the early years of M42. With the increasing threats of the awakening Star-Kingdoms and the orkoid response, to say nothing of the horrors of Waaagh Garaghak!, the Raven Guard were forced to seriously increase their recruitment rate. Their gene-banks were plundered and replacement progenoids were called from the Vaults of distant Mars to recruit more battle-brothers to simply fill the many vacant suits of armour and offset the increased mortality rate. The number of sworn in serfs was increased and each of them was implanted with a single immature artificial organ to speed up the rate of maturation. This worked after a fashion but was frequently crippling to the serfs and often led to incorrect growth patterns and deformities in the organ implanted.

The industrial infrastructure Kiavahr and its surrounding moons was ravaged as increasing materials were required for the unending wars and the legions of Battle-Serfs that the Ravern Guard were having to take along with them to bolster their failing ranks and take up some of the increasing work they were unable to spare personal attention for in the aftermath of Waaagh Garaghak! And the sector wide devastation that resulted.

The dereliction and ruin left in the wake of the Overfiend of Tallarax was an opportunity too great to pass up on by the insidious forces of the damned and forsaken and the increased activity of the warp-touched provided the knife in the back to the already besieged defenders of near-Deliverance space. Emergency supply lines to worlds just beginning to recover from the most recent conflicts were hijacked by chaos serving privateers seemingly for no other reason than to watch the misery they inflicted. As dreadfully weakened as it was the Forsarr Sector became a favourite hunting ground of the Dark Eldar.

The raids of the Dark Eldar became so prolific that the recently re-conquered former capital world of the sector, also named Forsarr, was all but depopulated in what became the know as the Night of Havoc and Tears. This shift in authority made the hideously industrial and increasingly hellish Kiavahr Hiveworld the new sector capital and that world was ruled from its moon of Deliverance and the throne of the Ravenspire.

Whether the Adeptus Administratum knew exactly what they were doing in giving a Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes such authority at the time is unknown. Thankfully Chapter Master Shrike had little to no interest in the economics or the political manoeuvrings of the worlds he found himself now responsible for and delegated much, if not all, of his governorship to councils, boards and comities of the most skilled and honest Adepts of the Aribters, Administratum and Ecclesiarchy as he could find.

This is just as well as Chapter Master Kayvaan Shrike, hero of Targus VIII, Donara and Yakhee and the slayer of Kernax Voldorius was cut down by the Arch-Hierophant of the warband known as the Disciples of Destruction some ten years later in the mid point of M42.

The succession of the chapter, and theoretical control of the sector, passed down from one competent but unremarkable Astartes to another.

It seemed for a time that stability of Imperial Rule had returned to that patch of the Segmentum Tempestus as worlds and homes were rebuilt, planetary infrastructures were repaired, industries began to function again, the uprisings quietened down and the xeno onslaught was halted and driven back.

Despite the sense of elation felt by the general populace of the sector during this time of respite the Raven Guard chapter itself was deep in despair. Further mutation and degradation of their genetic structure had resulted in near total biological collapse of the artificial organs.

This was not a problem confined solely to the Raven Guard. All the children of Corax had at least begun to show signs of degeneration and decay. Many found ways for their respective orders to survive in one form or another.

The Black Guard began to replace failing artificial organs with increasing amounts of cybernetic substitutes, by the time of the Imperiums collapse they had physically more in common with the Skitarii Elite than they did with the rest of the Adeptus Astartes. Though their bodies took new form they did not consider themselves to have changed in any meaningful way since the founding believing their holy cause to be one of the soul and not one entirely of flesh. They were not the only chapter to adopt this style of continuation, although they were the first.

The Dark Eagles and many of their kin, both spiritual and biological, in other chapters refused to sully the divine work of the Emperor with the patchwork tampering of their own hands. They opted to die out gracefully and with dignity. As time and attrition took more of them away they, with no great ceremony or sorrow, shut down their fortress monasteries one section at a time and dug each others graves in preparation for the end. It was a quiet death and there was no shame in it. The residents of their homeworlds and many of the serf families had other ideas. Their master might have given in to grim, fatalistic acceptance but they refused to surrender thousands of years of history because of a quirk of biology.

Most of the fatalistic chapter, after the death of the last battle brother or at least after the numbers got too low for them to offer any resistance, were seen to rise again from the ashes Legions strong in number. The humans they had served and protected for so very long stepped into the role left vacant and declared themselves inheritors of the chapter's responsibilities. These 'Little Astartes Brotherhoods' were seen with scorn and derision by most other true chapters and even in some cases (Minotaurs, Marines Malevolent, Genesis Chapter) open hostility.

Other chapter chose a, some would claim, more radical path towards self-preservation. Using contacts and allegiances forged over millennia of shared history they obtained genetic samples from most, if not all, of the gene-lines of the first founding legions. Using these undamaged genetic codes they were able remove and splice replacement codes into their damaged gene-seed. These chimeric chapters became the progeny of multiple primarchs but still held Corax as their one spiritual founder. The first of these, and the pioneers in this aspect of the dubious arts of gene-splicing, were the Raptors. Being the first they were able to get their numbers back up to full strength again with commendable swiftness.

The Raven Guard could take none of these options as they were seen as the progenitor chapter born from the Legion. They had to remain genetically pure as an exemplar to the chapters of its decent or what they were meant to be. They dared not water-down the blood of the primarch that flowed so proudly through their veins.

Through grim experiments each more monstrous that the last the denizens of Deliverance sought to find a way to halt and eventually reverse their failing biology. The human inhabitants of their own world and the planet that it orbited were unacceptable test-subjects so they were forced to gather their living harvest from the other worlds in the sector they ruled. These were dark days for the peoples of the Forsarr Sector as worlds were plundered and young children by the millions dragged from the arms of weeping families to be meat for the insatiable medical hunger of the Raven Guard Apothecarium. It was not science by invention or creativity but progress through the merciless attrition of trial and error through a hundred million variables. Progress was inevitable but slow to come and the cost in lives was astronomical.

By the dawning of M43 the people of the Forsarr Sector had learned to fear the name of those from the Ravenspire and despise the name Corax. The numbers of the Raven Guard continued to gradually fall as the years passed and the raids by the Green Horde and Silver Holocaust increased, worlds burn in the increased horror that is being thrown at the Imperium by a galaxy gone insane. The men and women of the PDFs and the Guard Regiments stationed in the sector hold themselves with distinction in the wars they wished to never fight despite the growing lack of support from the wider imperium and the horrible feeling that there is something quite un-right with the local regime that they were defending so valiantly.

Years passed and things only ever got worse. Industry became slower as the harried and terrified workforces fell victim to things without name and things all to well named and people that should have been their protectors. Economise dry up as people loose heart on heartbreaking scale and the worlds they know as home become darker places. Cultists of strange and horrific gods multiply as the faithful find their faith betrayed as the Shepards turn into wolves that descend upon the flocks. Forsarr looses it's soul.

501M43. The Emperor dies. What little macro-industrial practices were left in the sector by this point are killed off as the Astronomican fades away for the very last time. Worlds become isolated and laws unto themselves as the ability to communicate between systems with any rapidity is lost. Cultists on many of the worlds rise up like maggots across a long dead corpse and worlds burn in the fires of damnation. Into this maelstrom of murder and despair descended Inquisitor Helynna Valeria.

Sometime towards the dying days of M41 and the birth of M42 the good, if somewhat radical, Inquisitor had found herself caught inside a Tesseract Labyrinth by the ancient kleptomaniac Trazyn the Infinite. Time within the Tesseract did not work as it should and by the time she had found how to escape its multidirectional, pandimensional confinement she was far from her time of origin in an Imperium brought to its knees.

After the obligatory investigation, interrogation and examination she was declared fit to resume her duties and hold her old title.

With the increase in instability due to gene-stealer infestation across so much of the Imperium in the Segmantum Tempestus she knew where her expertise were to be most efficiently used. One decade after another she tracked and hunted down the near-people and once-people. Her blade was blade was never dry from the blood of the corrupted and the fallen. She re-established old alliances and ancient pacts with many a secretive organisation and even some with the less overtly hostile xeno kinds to further her holy work. Through dissection and study of the genetic drift found in the unholy xeno DNA she and her vast staff of acolytes began to predict where there were greater likelihood of further outbreaks occurring and sending forces to stop infestations before they had even truly started. All the while she was narrowing down, system by system, sector by sector, to the main hub of gene-stealer infestation in the segmentum.

After nigh on two centuries of purging and butchery and relentless searching she found where it should be. The hub of gene-stealer activity in the entire segmentum; the Hiveworld of Kiavahr. A place so polluted for so many hundreds of generations that the deformed and contaminated children of those taken by the cult would not raise undue suspicion in a population already so used to seeing mutants.

A dozen regiments of soldiers and skitarii hand picked by her trusted acolytes, a platoon of robots from the Legio Cybernetica and thousands or Inquisitorial Storm Troopers backed up by field medics and logistics experts from a dozen convents of the Adepta Sororitas were requisitioned and sent forth by the authority of the Inquisition to burn out this canker within the Imperial body.

The small crusade translated into the Raven Guard's system under the guise of a trader convoy lest the 'stealer cultists placed in positions of authority raise alarms and make life difficult for them. In dribs and drabs they descended into the underhives of Kiavahr and its surrounding moons and many of the off-world colonies.

As time was spent infiltrated amongst the terrified populace the Inquisitor began to realise that something was very, very wrong with the Raven Guard. As the 'stealer cults were hunted down and eradicated with merciful swiftness and laudable discretion they learned that the xeno abominations frightened the people slightly less than those they should revere as heroes and saviours.

After not much more than two years and several million genetically impure corpses the hunt for the cultists began to hit the point of diminishing returns. Still the forces of Inquisitor Valeria remained undetected by any in positions of authority. Murders were not uncommon on that world and much of their activities had been focused solely in the mutant slums and other such undesirable places full of unimportant people and near-people.

As the weeks went by and information was painstakingly gathered the Inquisitor began to get a clearer and clearer picture of what was happening in the system and the surrounding sector. Worlds were being neglected and miss-managed as the triumvirate councils set up by Chapter Master Shrike became occupied by unscrupulous, elf-serving politicians and to make matters worse the Raven Guard were indifferent or on some level being bribed with fresh human samples for their experiments heedless of how the greater Imperium suffered under their inexpert management.

The inquisitor, without seeking sanction from her superiors, began to plot the downfall of one of the oldest Astartes dynasties. Her agents were sent out into the general population to recruit and set up subversive organisations. Terrorist attacks were planned and the groundwork put in place for levels of destruction on a truly horrific scale. She knew, oh how it kept her awake at night, she knew how these attacks would hurt the people and further cripple Imperium integrity in this region of the galaxy. But she had no choice. The sector was so broken that the only way to fix it was to push it over and start again from the ground up.

And one day they all awoke to what looked very much like the beginnings of total social collapse. If there was ever a time to strike it had come.

The combat servitors and aspirants of the chapter found themselves no only under siege by the unruly mob of the abused populace but under the far greater threat from what seemed like teems of well trained, well equipped and highly disciplined kill-teams. Supply points and chapter munitions dumps were targeted by Inquisition trained civilians who had all lost someone to the chapters hunger. Many died but they died with fire in their eyes and hope in their hearts. Strange metallic techno-deamons spearheaded task-squads of skitarii, their immovable snarling jaws bellowing an unending stream of Mechainicus war hymns in incomprehensible battle binary.

Most of the legions of the Inquisition and their commandeered and covertly armed trader ships were tasked with holding key positions across the worlds so that the rioting masses didn't damage anything too valuable. Water-purifers, oxygen cyclers, nutri-vats and the great fission reactors would be necessary should there be any hope of rebuilding.

Day and night the battles raged in the streets and towns and caverns and tunnels and forgotten places deep below the ruined earth. Pockets of stability began to form in some areas on the worlds. Here a schola progenium facility shelters those seeking refuge against a tide of opportunistic Khorne Cultists, here the Fortress Precinct of the Arbiters becomes barricades a portion of the city against the hordes of the plague-zombies, the local convent of the order of the Cleansing Water repels the skirmishes of one of the missed gene-stealer cults and a hundred thousand other instances where small protected and barricaded enclaves of good men and women held the line against the horrors.

A shuttle was dropped from one of the trader vessels loaded with explosives and promethium. At full burn it slammed into the Ravenspire just as a squad of Inquisitorial Storm Troopers blew up the shield projectors down one side of that titanic edifice.

The spire was made of stern stuff, an architectural relic of the glorious days before the Imperium and even the Age of Strife. Though its structure was still intact and left standing it was a gutted blazing wreck of ash and conflagration. Relics and once-hallowed ground was left as cinder and ash.

Through the burning desolation the Inquisitor strode at the head of her army and met Chapter Master and his retinue coming the other way. The holo-novel writers in latter times always depict some grand declaration, a speech or a quick and spite filled quip and jape. There was not, there was a brief and startled moment before both sides before the firing started.

The Space marines had the inhuman skill and the raw power but the inquisitor had the numbers and the sheer bloody-minded belligerence that had allowed her to claw her way out of the Necrons Prison.

As the smoke cleared and the fires began to die down and the riots began to subside a broadcast was sent across the whole system telling them to simply "Keep calm and carry on, the Kiavahr system is now under the direct management of the Holy Inquisition".

Within a month the Kiavahr hives had recovered some form of functionality. Power generation was funning too much of the hive and most of the world had access to clean oxygen and water. The Peoples Army seized the stockpiles and ample food reserves of the rich and prosperous as rationing was put into immediate effect. The nutri-vats and the protein resequencing produced most of the planets food and most of them had been rendered inoperable or were suspected to have been contaminated by Nuglite cultists. The knowledge to rebuild the delicate and intricate parts and equipment needed to re-consecrate, purify and rebuild the broken mechanisms was known to the natives of Kiavahr but with their manufactorims smashed and the spirits of their tools so long idled they were unable to make them.

There were worlds whose food production rates exceeded local consumption levels within short warp jumps of the sector capital. The two closest were Silvanos II and Karanak. The trader vessels were emptied of all nonessential equipment and personnel and sent forth with full complements of the Peoples Army. Inquisitor Valeria had intended to use the troops as bargaining chips to secure the loyalty of these worlds, protection for food.

After a journey of almost three months and four months respectively and what should have been just over a week they arrived. Neither world, seeing the offer for exactly what it was, particularly wanted to come under the rule of Kiavahr. The soldiers in both instances did not give them an option. The ships came back, nearly a year after departure, without the soldiers but crammed full of food.

Inquisitor Helynna Valeria was not all that happy that neither Silvanos II nor Karanak had willingly joined into an alliance willingly, but ultimately it did not matter. They would be protected and the Kiavahr system would be fed. As the food flowed back into the society that was barely one meal away from starvation the rationing was relaxed, but not lifted.

As the years passed and the immediate threat of starvation died away the Peoples Army began to become the formal military force of t he three worlds. They were largely an amalgamation of the old PDF and the covert specialist that had been brought in from off world. This was a pivotal moment in the history of what was increasingly becoming know as the Deliverance Alliance, they were no longer a subjugated people dying under the uncaring hands of inhuman post-humans. Little by little they began to rebuild their broken world. The adepts of the mechanicus once more came out of hiding and began to tend the machines that they had so lovingly maintained previously and the planets industry began to recover once again.

Goods began to be exported off world. Mostly to Silvanos II and Karanak but other vessels from further a field began to appear during the lulls in the storms. Trader vessels that had survived the churning of the warp in caused by the Emperors death began to surface bringing news of other worlds that had survived to some degree. Former navy vessels now cut adrift from supply lines were left to fend for themselves. Some became pirates and some became mercenary and most attached themselves to the defence of whatever pocket of civilisation they happened to be closest to at the time but many became traders.

Many of these vessels were hired or seized by the government of Kiavahr to bolster its own fledgling fleet from its renovated space-docks.

As the periods of respite in the agitated Warp began to become more frequent eyes started to turn towards other worlds.

But things were not well for Inquisitor Helynna Valeria. From a life time of abuse, the strange effects of the lasting effects of the Tesseract Labyrinth and some truly horrendous injuries at the hands of the last of the Raven Guard she was at last beginning to die. She knew this, the healing sisters of her old retinue knew this but thankfully the general populace did not. None were sure how long she had left. Some said barely a few months others maybe a few years.

Deep in the salvaged genetics laboratories of the Ravenspire, below the tortured ground and burn out ruins, the future of the Deliverance Alliance began to take shape. Using mostly her own genetic material with the flaws removed and superior codes from the old genetic samples spliced in the Inquisitor commissioned the Adeptus Biologicus to gene-forge for her a successor.

By degrees the world of Kiavahr and its moons began to recover. As it did so the wealth and prosperity it generated began to flow out to its satellite states. Farming methods in the enclosed agri-domes of Karanak became many times more efficient and an end to rationing was brought about. People stopped living in such fear of pestilence, as vaccines were mass-produced against seemingly trivial diseases that were becoming major epidemics. Malnutrition and starvation became increasingly less common as the economises of the alliance and emergency aid could be sent to areas ruined by natural disasters. Even the air on Kiavahr became more breathable as the industries that had so marred the world were rebuilt cleaner and more efficient.

To many it had become a new golden age where one should not be. As the systems ruled by Deliverance increased in prosperity and the people became happier many of the protests against harsher aspects of the regime began to die down.

The genetic child of the Inquisitor, Amelia Valeria, was in her second year when Inquisitor Helynna Valeria finally succumbed to her injuries. As the child grew she was taught by the best scholars in the fledgling alliance. She was taught the arts or oration and political discourse, she was taught how to manipulate the fears and desires of people in both collectives and as individuals, she was taught how to listen to her advisors but ultimately how to ignore them as well, she was taught the finer points of governance and how to marshal the resources of her worlds, she was taught everything she needed to be the perfect leader for the people she was to inherit. In her formative years the rulership of the Deliverance Alliance was entrusted to a council of Inquisitor Valeria's most trusted lieutenants who made sure the news of her death was not to be released until her daughter could assume the throne.

When the time was right for her to assume the throne of her world her perfected, tailored genetics was evident. She was tall, slender and elegant and her poise and bearing spoke of unearthly grace and authority. Her inaugural speech sent out across the entire system was one of fire and glory and it filled the people with a sense of purpose and determination gone since the fall of the Imperium.

The great fleets and star charts acquired by her mother were at last ready to be used. The great armadas were sent out against a dozen worlds within slow warp transit of Deliverance bearing a full cargo of soldiers and war machines.

The galaxy they spread out into was a graveyard. A vast mausoleum of long dead corpses already picked over by desperate hands. Here and there a few survived. Scared and pitiful, they hid in the ruins of old hives a few hundred in number where once had been billions. They hid at the bottom of mineshafts on worlds just settling into the snowballing pattern of nuclear winter.

These worlds entered into the Alliance willingly, desperately and unconditionally even, just so long as someone came and took away some of their unending horror. Some worlds were still in states of semi-functionality, patches of them still inhabitable with functioning societies living above the level of mere survival. Few of these joined willingly, but join they did.

In the years that followed Kiavahr, Silvanos II and Karanak had their resources drained and rationing was put back into effect as materials were sent to theses newly discovered unfortunates. Unhappiness began to rise in the streets again and the Adeptus Arbiters were put on alert in case things got out of hand. It was testament to her skill and training that Governess Valeria managed to pacify with rhetoric and token gestures the growing feelings of dissatisfaction. By the year 540M43 twenty inhabited planetary systems were contributing members of the Deliverance Alliance and many more expeditionary armadas were in the planning stages.

By some unholy miracle of heathen gods the beast Garaghak had survived. With a new merry band of boyz at his command he descended upon a dozen worlds in Alliance without any prelude or warning. Worlds only recently stabilised and dragged back into the harsh light of civilisation found their garrison of the Peoples Army and their PDF Regiments sourly tested. Across a dozen worlds battle raged and given the slow rate of travel in these times it would be some time before any help was forthcoming from the other worlds.

Despite the logistical problems of having no astronomican to steer their ships by the Warboss did not have it all as he would have wanted it.

The trader ships and migrant fleets that visited the Alliance had brought back terrible stories.

An empty hive world on an airless rock surrounded by fields upon fields of human bones stuck into the ground like ossified reeds in patterns of impossible geometries horizons wide and only properly visible from low orbit. Even at that distance they caused eyes that looked upon them to bleed.

A forge-world and surrounding support systems. A population of an estimated four trillion, three of which were found without any skin and the remaining were just never found.

A swathe of space twenty light years wide and nearly two hundred long that was never colonised despite the assertions of the crews of the ships and the migrant fleets that they were regularly visited for the expertise the natives had with repair work. Sometimes, if the angle and light is right, the people who never were can be seen going about their business as if all was right and well.

In short, the people of the Alliance had been preparing for a war but were never sure against exactly what. With the considerable industrial might of the Kiavahr hives the orks found themselves outgunned and, out manoeuvred and out classed by the disciplined Peoples Army who were just too proud bloody-minded to die to green hands.

Three years and the war was over, the image of a defiant soldier holding the aloft severed head of the Warboss was broadcast across any world close enough to receive as a warning and a challenge.

By the time 999M44 became 000M45 the Deliverance Alliance was a small but important Empire. Worlds that had been coerced unwillingly forgot their struggles against their fellow man within a few generations by the might of its propaganda department and the regiments and legions of the Peoples Armies supplied innumerable victories that were to be boasted about.

As the forty-fifth millennium opened up before them and the warp storms began to subside in almost their entirety they were to come across their greatest threat. The Great Eldar Empire. Thought the threat of invasion and defeat seemed very real they knew they would not bend the knee to an uncaring galaxy.


	8. Armageddon's Children

The founding of the Abyssal Dominion could in truth trace its ancestry all the way back to the year 444M41 and the far off world of Armageddon. That polluted ball of corruption named for the end of days had come to the attention of things nameless and hideous and cruel beyond measure, and not all of them should have been their adversaries. The birth of this realm was born from the treachery and deceit of the Old Imperium and the overzealous hypocrisy of the Grey Knights.

The war to drag that world from the ruined hands of Angron and his horde of insane killers and deamons was a hard and a bitter one but one that was ultimately won. The regiments and native peoples of Armageddon had fought long and hard and spilt their very life's blood over the soil of that distant world and for their dedication ad faith were cut down with inhuman cruelty. Troopships were blasted out of the atmosphere as they left the world triumphant and the silvered heroes in their midst revealed themselves to be little better than the foe vanquished.

Citizens who had picked up the weapons of the fallen and formed ad-hoc militias were rounded up and sent to die the pitiable death of traitors and oath-breakers in the post-war concentration camps as replacement populations were brought in from off-world to fill the shoes of the betrayed dead

But some escaped and some slipped by, some hid and some endured and some were helped by less inhuman post-humans. Logan Grimnar of the Space Wolves was a man of more moral integrity than the Grey Knights and the Inquisition. His world was a brutal world where a man was judged noble by the firmness of his word and not the depth of the knife plunged into the back of an ally. He hid children and soldiers and whole convoys of families on overcrowded commandeered trader ships and hastily disguised troop carriers and bid them farewell as they fled weeping into the abyss. The wroth of the Inquisition and the Knights was incandescent and the Space Wolves were threatened with sever censures for what they had done. The Old Wolf dared them to try and they backed down. Far out in the star speckled darkness there was no respite for the sorry souls on ragged ships.

With no friendly port in sight and relentless hunters on their trail they wandered the inky black for forever and a day. On tides of light from foreign stars, across seas of dust and solar wind they sailed but no force their size could remain in the void forever. The nutri-vats of the larger ships could not accommodate the increased population they were demanded to feed, the air gradually began to become staler and parts of the ship began to wear out beyond the ability of the enginseer's repair rituals to fix. They were a fleet with nothing. They were on their knees with nothing to loose, alone in the dark. They had only one option.

Many of those in the flotilla had been soldiers in their past life, the bulwark against the night. With the cunning and guile of their former Rogue Trader captains they sent out signals and broadcasts that declared them to be regiments of the guard who had fallen in battle elsewhere. Regiments whose deaths were both far away and long ago and often as utterly fictitious as the worlds they were said to hail from.

They would descend into hopeless wars and certain defeats with a savagery and efficient brutality not seen, so said the legends of later years, since the Thunder Warriors of the Unification Wars. They were the random chance that threw the strategies to the wise to the winds, they were the untraceable variable and the vicious wildcard that and they knew only the barest of mercies that they had been shown.

Often the rulers of these grateful worlds did not know who had been their benefactors until after the war was all but over and time could be spared to investigate and put pieces together. And often only then when the men of the abyss laid down their price in food, ship parts and the tools they needed to march to war again. When they were refused their price, and they all too often were, they took what they were owed by a force the natives had not the ability or will to resist. Some saw them as saviours and some saw them as madmen of the stars but many saw them as little more than vagabond mercenaries in ships assumed to have been stolen.

They could never remain in the same place for too long. To remain stationary was to invite those that hounded their steps to close and drag them down.

By slow increments the conditions on the flotilla improved as the years, decades and generations past. Fresh nutri-vats were added along with water filtration systems. New ships were bought, salvaged or captured from renegades and consecrated by the priesthood descended from the old priests of Armageddon and the battle-preachers of the near-forgotten regiments. Refineries, manufactoria and all manner of workshops were set up to process raw mineral wealth hewn from unclaimed asteroids by the temporary pre-fab mining stations.

The Navigators, who had been resident to the ships commandeered, knowing they could never return to their homes and families on Terra, took companions from crews and citizens of the ships. There was, and still is, an extremely disproportionate frequency of navigators and regular psykers starting families. From these, some would claim, unnatural unions of psyker and navigator came the half-breed demi-navigator. They were never capable of competing with the true members of the Navis Nobillite within the bounds of the Emperors Light, but that was a sea they seldom sailed. They were new navigators for a new and desperate age. They were less reliant on the astronomican, more human. Many of them claimed that they were closer to their ancestors who dwelt before the time of the astronomican in the days of the First Stellar Exodus.

As the frantic flight for survival turned into the humdrum drudgery of everyday life and the world turned upside down became the world the right way up some manner of social order began to reassert itself. The main legislative body of the flotilla was the Parliament. It was not housed on a single ship but encompassed the will of the captains to argue and debate without bloodshed. It was the Parliament that passed the laws that governed the day-to-day lives of the inhabitants of the ragged fleet.

There was the War Council that formed the leadership of its armies, mostly from the officers of the old regiments. This group was only legally recognised as an official institution by the Parliament after the people of the abyss came to the realisation that the only way they could survive, given that the majority of civilised Imperial worlds would not trade with them, was to obtain recourses by becoming mercenaries. Oddly the thought of outright piracy never occurred to any as a serious option.

Above the War Council and the Parliament was the Commodore. An individual prized for their good judgement and fair mind. A man or woman of wisdom to guide those that dwelt in the abyss when decisive actions were needed more than competitive division. Only elected in times of need and obligated to resign the post the moment that need was sated. Often the same person could hold the rank on different occasions, if their judgement was proved to be sound. Once removed from office they lost all powers of authority so that no one individual could become a warlord.

No matter how much time slipped by, no matter the distance that was measured in the tens of thousands of light-years the people of the abyss never forgot where they had come from. As one generation became the next the stories of the homes they had lost were passed down and the treachery of the Imperium was remembered with the bitterest of detestation.

By the closing of M41 the flotilla of the abyssal people had reached the point where it was the rival of some of the smaller conquest fleets of the Imperium. But strong though they were they knew well enough to stick to the outer systems and the periphery of Imperial light. Many of the worlds they came to the aid of had never heard of Armageddon or even Space Marines and were all too often in such a dire state of need that the could have cared in any case.

It is even on record that they came to the aid of numerous xeno-breeds and non-Imperial humans. Such actions were considered only more rope to hang them with by the Inquisition who inevitably found out, usually by consorting with the xenos they were condemning the abyssals for consorting with. Not that it did them much good as by the time they had caught up to where the fleet was it was already somewhere else (and they never told anyone outside their fleet where they were going) under a new and equally authentic looking identity.

By the year 500M42 they had amassed and attracted the attentions of chaotic warbands who saw them as nothing so much as rivals. A band of wandering killers for hire much like themselves, steeped in cunning and guile and trained in the craft of death dealing by the life of the outcast and the forsaken. Some even tried to ally themselves with Armageddon's children and perpetrate raids on unprotected border worlds. It did not end well for them.

For the most part they managed to avoid Imperial attention for most of their history. Sometimes they would encounter an Inquisitor or a general with more zealously than pragmatism and repercussions were had. On numerous occasion after helping to save a world from such predations as the universe was pleased to heap on them they found themselves run out of systems that they had help preserve until the Imperium could send its soldiers. On numerous occasions their old hunters, the Grey Knights, hounded them and whatever luckless regiments they were dragging along in their wake. Always the empty void was their salvation. In the vast cathedral of stars they were free.

Dreams of finding a new home safe and free of Imperial rule and predation were abandoned as the years passed. Memories of the world they had left behind them became nothing more than a historical curiosity of yesteryear. They were children of the stars now and forever and they knew no other life.

The years ground by. Favour, luck and fortune waxed and waned over they years. Their fleet grew and shrank by acquisition and losses but ultimately they endured.

In the mid part of M43 during a routine trip out to the edges of the pacificus segmentum to strike for pastures new when the Emperor expired and society was suddenly turned upon its head in a single night of sorrow and suffering.

In an instant they people of the abyss were thrown into confusion. Their demi-navigators collapsed vomiting blood and babbling incoherently about the light of Old Earth and the shadow it cast.

With scant few moments to spare before the fleets were torn apart by the roaring inferno-storm they found themselves plunged into they existed the warp.

By good fortune they exited mere light months from a habitable system.

By bad fortune the system they exited next to was Salath, right in the middle of the Mowart Reach. Well out on the western galactic border and far beyond Imperial concerns or interest. Marginally under Imperial control they were one of those rare exceptions of an inhabited world way beyond the traditional astronomican border that members of the Navis Nobillite usually refused to cross. They had, for the most part, accepted one version or another of the Imperial Creed but had been mostly converted by missionaries prior to the Age of Apostasy and as such felt themselves not beholden to the Ecclesiarchy.

That patch of the galactic edge was rife with orks and worse and Salath was in a war it could not win. Fires burned so bright that they could be seen from orbit, the constant wars had reduced much of the surface uninhabitable by conventional and tribes of mutants had arisen from the radioactive wastes that covered much of the world. Rain seldom fell as the dust in the upper atmosphere disrupted the hydrological cycle and left much of the world in arid strife.

With the intervention of the people of the stars the war took on a new turn. The orkish fleets found their unprotected rear and flanks harassed relentlessly in lightning raids that the lumbering killa krooza fleets were unable to adequately repel.

Fresh troops landed by the regiment in well-ordered ranks that ground the orkish horde to paste. The regiments of the flotilla looked like a shoddy mercenary band, mismatched arms and armour from a hundred worlds and some surviving pieces of equipment still from their original flight from Armageddon so very long ago. Though they may have looked slapdash and shabby they were well disciplined and taught to handle their weapons almost from the day they could walk. The arts of conquest were their living, and they had lived well.

Within two years Salath was purged. The inhabitants were left to scrape their meagre livings on their ruined world in relative, and probably temporary, peace. Such an impoverished people could never meet any price the abyssals could have asked for after the orks had taken everything of value, but the abyssals never asked. Ransacking the holds and storehouses of the orks they managed to more than recuperate their losses and moved on thinking nothing more on the matter.

Unbeknownst to the abyssals word from Salath slowly began to spread as refugee convoys and the occasional brave trader ship talked and shared reports and stories. In a galaxy plunged into more anarchy than usual their deed became amplified as the stories were retold.

The warp was treacherous as they once more set sail, as if something deeper than imaging had died and sharks were fighting over its carcass.

This sorry state of affairs was all too common on all too many worlds. Salath was not an exception in this wretched part of the galaxy; it was the rule. Worlds beat down again and again until they could never dream of picking themselves up.

Again and again the abyssals would intervene during chaotic uprisings, dark eldar raids, ork WAAAAAAAAAAAGH!s and worse. Most worlds they visited were poor and wretched places with starving populations and salted earth. The void born wanderers could not extract payment where none was to be found and so they survived off of the salvage of the vanquished, but it was not enough. As the years passed and the wars showed no sign of relenting weary eyes began to look towards the horizon.

It was in the aftermath of another campaign on another desolate and bleak world that the Commodore Talaat Goldberg, distant descendant of the infamous Rogue Trader of M41, that changed the course of the flotilla and its people forever.

The mood amongst the Parliament was that the miserable patch of space they found themselves bogged down in should be abandoned. It had proven to be a fruitless endeavour and that it was high time to find greener pastures. Talaat Goldberg, it was said, looked upon the stars and what lay beyond. Light-year upon light-year of darkness speckled with promising lights.

"And go where? This cruel night is not confined to a handful of pitiful stars".

And indeed it was not. News from the displaced, the homeless and the lost (to make no mention of their own demi-navigators and psykers) had told them the same thing again and again and again, the light of Terra shone no more and darkness had spilt across the stars in a tide of madness.

The time had come when the outcast had finally stopped running, if only because they had nowhere left to run to.

By this time stories from worlds they had saved were reaching the proportions of exaggerated legends to equal only worst excesses of the propaganda department of the Old Imperium. They were seen as vengeful saviours and wrathful angels that descended upon broken worlds with holy light in one hand and murderous intent in the other. They were brave soldiers seemingly drawn from every corner of the Emperor's Realm who vanquished their foes and asked for nothing in return.

Commodore Goldberg was fast to capitalise on this good will. For the first time since its fateful flight from Armageddon the fleet divided.

Piratical scum who had long ago grown complacent so far from the Imperial Navy patrols found their ships boarded, their crews slaughtered and their vessels stolen. The fact that the flotilla was mostly comprised of renovated civilian derelicts and other non-military craft upgraded to house armaments caught them off guard as they were seemingly savaged by sharks dressed as flounders. It was not known at the time that those nefarious space farers were the minions of greater things.

The flotilla grew fast off of these spoils. Most of the ships they acquired were modified civilian designs and a very few ex-navy vessels, but they served their purpose well enough. It was a strange fleet, a peculiar peace keeping force. Mismatch ships with no two quite alike in a patch of space populated by impoverished worlds that lacked the industrial base to build any of them.

It should be known that Goldberg was not an exceptionally good man and was not doing this out of the kindness of his heart. He was a survivor and intended for his people to survive and if that meant dragging a handful of pitiable worlds with him then so be it. In many ways he was much like his distant ancestor; he had inherited his guile, cunning, devious intellect and ruthless nature but with out the flair for the dramatic, love of overly complex schemes and sense of fun. He was a competent Goldberg, a truly dreadful thing.

This predation of the jackals amongst the stars did not go unnoticed. There were those in high places with a vested interest in the comings and goings of little scavengers and opportunistic killings, shadowy things that kept the worlds of the Mowart Reach in poverty for the suffering they offered. The pirate kings had been nothing but pawns to them, playthings and toys one and all.

With his new and expanded fleet Talaat Goldberg owned the space lanes. Every convoy of ships that passed through the lonely night did so at his allowance. Convoys were protected, for a cut of the profits from the journey. Those that did not pay and believed that they could survive on their own soon found, to their dismay that they could not. No sooner were they out of the system than pirates were upon them and their lives were over. Rumours were abounding that these were not mere chance attacks but nothing could ever be proved, all that was known was that the fleet continued to grow at a steady rate.

By one protection deal at a time the influence of the fleet became engrained in the workings of that reach of space. After a decade of monopolising travel safety and gaining a stranglehold on all off-world imports and exports the real work began.

By bribes most prodigious and threats decidedly disproportionate and all too believable he began to influence the elections of a double dozen worlds and more. His agents and candidates pitted against rivals whom all back down or suffered accidents of the most unfortunate kind. A legion of puppets with one puppeteer who in turn pulled the strings of worlds, pitiful worlds it is true, but worlds none the less.

Just as the last pieces of his New Empire were falling into place, without any of his puppets or new subjects realising the full scale of his mad ambition it must be said, a true disaster struck.

Freed during the 14th Black Crusade from the Crone Worlds and the eternal suffering lash of their patron gods the Chaos Eldar were free. Abhorrent things that made even the most debased Commorite Mandrakes and Haemonculi recoil in instinctive disgust. Architects and benefactors of The Fall who laughed with crazed glee and capered with shades of twisted mirth to the deaths and worse of trillions of their own kind and the creature unreal that they had birthed from their debauchery. The Mowart Reach, so cut off from anything but the orkish hordes, had been their playground. Billions of humans suffering under the cruelty of their predations and the hammer blows of the orkoid hordes had been a most divine offering upon the alter of ruined impoverished worlds.

Their retribution was swift and their wroth was terrible. Epidemics became rife as plagues were released upon a dozen worlds, dormant cults of sorcerers who had previously been pulling the strings of the Reach were ordered to become active and sow the seeds of chaos, drugs and vile toxins were released in to water and air supplies whilst food stores were poisoned and crops were blighted. Worse than these and far more insidious were the memetic contagions.

A tune heard on the national broadcasts, a picture or carefully positioned collection of lines scrawled on a wall even a carefully timed string of events that triggered a sequence of emotional or intellectual responses in an appreciable percentage of the local populations brains. These stimuli formed patterns of thought in the human mind that self replicated like viri in improperly maintained cojitator endjins. Strange behavioural patterns started to emerge in populations with specific cultural marks that made them susceptible to particular attacks. These behaviours would then trigger the dormant emergent programming in other unsuspecting unfortunates.

People, good Emperor-fearing people, would be going about their business and blackout. They would latter wake up elsewhere with no memory of past events and no explanation for the trail of ritually mutilated bodies.

The men and women of the abyss were from a distinctly different culture and so were not directly effected by the weaponized thoughts so brilliantly tailored to others. Whether this was due to the fallen eldar believing themselves untouchable and so not needing to torment the abyssals or whether it was an oversight on their part is unknown.

It was at this point that Talaat Goldberg suggested to the Parliament that losses should be cut and chances taken in the vastness of wilderness space. To the commodores dismay this was almost unanimously rejected. The currents of the warp were still in deep turmoil and the demi-navigators informed them in no uncertain terms that the ships would be torn to very small pieces indeed if they attempted to travel at any great speed, and the nearest recorded system of humanity was nearly five-hundred light-years away from the Reach, assuming it had survived. Also the people of the flotilla had seen what they had become in the eyes of the natives; Avenging Angels.

The Emperor had delivered them to where they were needed when they were needed. Many had begun to form attachments to the people of the Reach and all knew that nowhere would welcome them in the galaxy gone mad.

It was only the bolstering of the PDF armies by the denizens of the fleets that any sort of cohesion or integrity was capable of being maintained during this time of unrest. Meagre in number though they were when compared to the billions in arms across the whole of the Mowart Reach they provided a solid core around which to regroup and rebuild.

Again and again with various ploys both insidious and cruel the Chaos Eldar assaulted the people of the Reach to heap suffering on suffering in the names of their blasphemous gods and also to sate their own base and degenerate appetites. They seldom went into battle themselves, they were few in number and haughty beyond human understanding. War was a menial task to be carried out by their servants and slaves.

But it seldom worked as they wished it would. The foreign interlopers seemed remarkably resilient to their sadistic shenanigans. Any headway they made into returning to utter suffering was short lived at best and counter productive when people with nothing to loose became defiant. It was primarily from these sad defiant and war orphans that the Abyssals began to recruit from to fill the holes left in their own ranks. Their numbers began to grow once more.

But neither could they be beaten. Their forces and assets were spread far and thin and seldom came out of hiding.

But just as the abyssals were trapped in the Reach so they found themselves likewise ensnared.

Years turned to decades and order was maintained. Through one sorry atrocity after another the beating continued. Seemingly the forces of order could not fight back, only react and rebuild as raiders struck with impunity in a hundred cruel ways.

This was not so. The Adeptus Arbites had been far from idle. With each atrocity and ritual massacre they had been painstakingly piecing together the web of allegiances that knitted the disparate cults and cabals of Chaos Eldar and their mortal dupes.

In the year 547M43 a critical mass of information had been accumulated and pieced together. As the information was presented to the old man Talaat had become a devils grin spread across his brutal features.

Across more than two score worlds whole armies moved with purpose and a dreadful resolve. They were given locations and one very simple order "Kill them all". Warehouses, old nuclear bunkers, cathedrals, caves, homes, orbital stations and a hundred other places were all targeted as a vengeful horde of humanity descended with the Judges at their head.

The fights, in some of the worst incidents, left whole nations quarantined by deamonic fallout as the perverted eldar called their allies from the other side of nightmares. Thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, died in the assaults to stop the predations that had claimed billions. The fires of conflict lasted for almost a year as legions perished and worlds burned.

By the end of that dreadful year the fighting was over. In the years that followed there was the occasional outbreak of the memetic and biological contagions, a minor deamon raised and quickly banished to the Hell that spawned it but nothing serious. Maybe one or two of the fallen xenos survived but if so than they were hiding from men and monsters and the gods they had failed.

The worst of it was over and the sun seemed to shine for the first time beyond living memory. Talaat Goldber was remembered as Saint Goldberg and not Goldberg the Ruthless as any just history would have remembered him. Commodore Goldberg stepped down from his post at the years end, the decades long emergency was over. He spent his final few twilight years tending a garden on an unnamed world at an unrecorded location, but it was said it was one where he could watch the sun rise.

The fleets continued to patrol the trade lanes of the Reach and impose some sort of order.

In time the shared suffering and communal triumph of the worlds of the Reach caused alliances to become more firm until they started thinking of themselves as a singular sovereign realm, unified without equal under the benevolent rule of their protectors from the stars. Which is a lot nicer than saying that the abyssals suggested that they come under their jurisdiction and covertly murdering the voices of opposition.

By the time of the 45th millennium the Mowart Reach was known as the Abyssal Dominion and was nowhere near as impoverished as it once had been. And although nowhere in the dark days of such a time could be considered truly safe it was as close as it could be.


	9. Sleeping Rust

The Adeptus Mechanicus carried on much as it ever had done through the dying years of the Imperium and for the most part shared the same fate.

It was suspected that well over eighty percent of forgeworlds and other primarily mechanicus dominated worlds perished in one way or another during the madness left in the wake of the Emperors passing. Many worlds simply starved, those rich enough to afford space passage having left the dying world. Most of those suffered a fate worse than death in the Warp Gone Mad. Forgeworlds were not places where food could be easily cultivated and with the imports cut off devolved into cannibalistic anarchy.

These Scrap-worlds, as they became known, were never silent for long. Orks required them. Necrontyre were awakening from death and in turn so did the spawn of Gork and Mork. Supply of equipment and vehicles for the WAAAGH! Effort. These new orkoids worked with an alien and savage efficiency and once more the manufactoria and construction shrines were bustling with activity and purpose.

Graveyard worlds of dust blowing between spires of brass and adamaintium were all that resulted on some world as Invention Cults and Puritan Cults released weapons both old and new up on the worlds they held as sacred ground defiled in each of their eyes by the other. These were in some ways the saddest worlds, two sides of stubborn fools genuinely wanting what was best for those their love butchered.

Coutrswainians did battle with Dragonites as the pieces of a mad dead god warred in the minds corrupted by pilgrimage to the Noctis Labyrinthus and those who heeded warnings of those driven mad with terror. Conventional reality was as much a victim as the suffering humanity in these conflicts whilst worlds burned. But none burned so completely as Mars.

Not all burned. A few endured and even prospered. The Ryza Confederacy was by far the largest of these Mechanicum Dominions stretching as it did in all direction just far enough to nominally claim Catachan. Although arguably the most successful though it was it was it was by no means unique.

There was Helios and its famous and vicious splice-soldiery that held more than a dozen systems in thrall. The Old Imperium considered many of the worlds that surrounded ancient Helios agri-worlds and food was the main deficiency that the tech-adepts were suffering. Most of the surrounding worlds had limited or almost totally absent industrial capabilities. They seemed an ideal mach and would have been were it not for human hubris. In the inevitable wars the agri-worlds were ruthlessly subjugated and garrisoned with gene-spliced mutant soldiers. Helios and its Tithe-Worlds would survive, whether they wanted to or not.

There were the mercenary realm of The Lathes whose half-ogyrn inhabitants sold their technical services and produce to any and all who could pay, and they were never short of customers. They never became great movers or shakers of the nightmare the galaxy had become but in turn they could not be readily moved or shook. A hundred planetary governments would jump to their defence if they though they might receive a discount.

There was Ordana and its symbiotic allies from a score of mind-bound worlds. Possibly alone of all the surviving Forgeworlds they had willingly and knowingly broken the First Commandment; "Suffer not the machine that thinks like a man". It was the Omnissiah given a fitting form and all joined their cerebral implants to it to share in that old divinity made anew. Despite the fears and expectations of many the song it sung into the minds of its disciples was one of unending love. It became the Mother-Omnissiah. The disciples of this new and strange religion went forth from the fortress of Ordana and forcibly installed cerebral augmentation of the citizenry of surrounding worlds believing that it would be crueller to let them suffer silence. They were fought against and billions died but ultimately it was a struggle in vain, all those who were 'saved' from this new goddess did everything in their power to return and take their old families with them to share in such joy.

Always there were the tinker fleets who fled the burning of the Jovian Orbitals. Half trader and half nomad they travelled primarily amongst the Hive-worlds and, for a bartered price, performed the maintenance rituals needed to keep the life-supporting systems of those artificial environments functioning.

So powerful with the Omnissias bounty were most forgeworlds that only two were ever conquered whilst they still lived, most empires wanting plunder and conquest simpely besieged them and waited for them to starve. Agripinaa and Perinetus. Twin bastions of the Dark Mechanicus and bitter rivals in constant back stabbing strife, they made perfect additions to the fell realm of the Cadian Commonwealth.

Upon some worlds, Accatran, Perinetus, Urdesh, M'khand and Magnos Omicron as examples, without the means to support themselves the magi councils were forced to take drastic steps to ensure not only their survival but the survival of the species. Their worlds were never capable of supporting or defending themselves without off-world assistance and on those worlds that, for one reason or another, could not adapt to a new and uncaring galaxy. With dwindling food and water reserves and enemies closing on all sides and from within steps were taken that were well beyond drastic and into the realms of carefully calculated monstrosity.

Cannibalising the STC derived interchangeable parts of many of the forgeworlds systems great galleries of stasis vaults were constructed. Legions strong could be housed and stored within. Resources would be conserved, it was claimed by the leaders and the preachers and the magi, by having significant fractions of the population leapfrogging through time. It sounded plausible. It was a drastic step, for these were drastic times, but it sounded like hope.

Too bad it was a lie. They were execution chambers. By the time anybody realised anything was amiss almost ninety percent of the populations were driven into extinction and the combat-servitors and psyco-shackled skitarii simply annihilated the remainder. It was the most gentle of genocides ever committed on that scale.

But the slaughtered citizens were not wasted. Genetic samples were taken and cyber-blessings were harvested. The organic contents of the corpse mountains were rendered down as nutrients for the living.

The harvested cyber-blessings were used to improve upon the skitarii and the surviving magi and the few surviving adepts who genuinely were now sleeping the deep sleep of bio-suspension in the abeyance vaults. The glory of the machine held few of the needs of the weak flesh. By sacrificing almost all of their organic nature the children of the Omnissiah learned that they could survive for many, many thousands of years if need be on what biological material they had.

It is worth noting that the adepts in sleep knew nothing of the deaths of their kin or the alterations made to their own flesh as they lay in slumber. They had believed their world would rise whole from the ashes of this age of ruin, an unrusting iron phoenix to rekindle the glories of the Ancients.

The executioners of this terrible plan knew, with marrow deep certainty knew, that they would never be forgiven for what they had done. They knew that in the Coming

Empire their names would be detested by the next generation and all the generations to come. But there would be a next generation and so it would be worth it.

With their worlds so depleted and yet so tempting for scavengers they could no longer fend off there was only one step left to take. Exterminatus grade weapons were employed. No one ever again looked at those graveyard worlds, sad irradiated balls of ruined wreckage and rust that they were.

Deep beneath the blighted skies and afflicted ground they slept. Magi stripped down to little more than a pound of brain tissue and bio-support structures, right at the barest minimal legal requirements, and rebuilt from pillaged unhungering cyber-blessings took it in turns to peer out from the holes they cowered in.

With their armies and leaders leapfrogging their way through the ages and the future teachers of children as yet unborn from the genetic libraries in the deepest of deathly slumbers they theorised that they could stretch out their supplies for thousand, tens of thousands and in some cases maybe almost a million years.

They would wait and they would watch. One day the galaxy would be safe. One day the guns would fall silent, the killing would be done and the wars would be over. One day, by the grace of the Omnissiah, the dark gods would die, the fires would go out and the nightmare would finish. One day there would be a reason to hope and not just a need. One day.


	10. Suffer not the Witch

For the vast majority of the human psychic population the Age of Unreason was a time of unrelenting horror. As the Emperor expired he dragged a hundred million of the soul-bound in his journey to the grave, the great and occasionally noble houses of the Navis Nobillite were likewise devastated as over half their population was subjected to the unspeakable Hell the Sol System became and for those that survived the trials were just beginning.

The death of scream of Holy Terra was amplified by the last splutters of the Astronomicon and broadcast almost seventy thousand light-years in all directions. Many ships were blown so far off course they landed deep in the intergalactic nothingness, further than any ship had sailed before. Or at least further than any ship had ever returned from for the utter starless wastes were not as empty as could be hoped and none dared think of the sleepless, deathless, timeless abhorrences that drifted through that empty nightmare.

Mistrust of the psykers was always endemic with in the Old Imperium as it was a regime originally built upon the bones of a society that collapsed during the psyker outbreaks of the Age of Strife and the horrors inflicted in that harrowing time and suffered a history of its own for which suspicion of the 'gifted' was not unwarranted. This was nothing to the great persecutions of the new and brutal era.

Many worlds executed their witch population down to the last child, often involving quite a lot of ceremony. Many believed that the loss of the God-Emperor was a direct result of them harbouring The Unclean within their midst and sought his forgiveness in blood. It never worked, obviously. Many of those performing the ritual sacrifices simply got a thrill from being allowed to slaughter their neighbours with impunity.

The Navigators were usually exempt from the witch-hunts of the Age of Unreason, at least at the level of law. It was no longer safe for them to step onto the worlds they sailed between as the sight of their gene-deviations made them too obvious a target.

With the loss of the astropath population the usefulness of psykers was seen as spent and the one reason for tolerance of their kind was expended. The lucky ones had to hide for the remainder of their lives, the unlucky ones didn't hide well enough.

There were exceptions to this rule, of course. Any society that wished to propagate itself over more than one stellar system required psychic talent to some degree. Navigators could run courier ships and message boats fast enough to hold together a localised empire of maybe a few dozen worlds at the very most. For anything larger the only means of FTL communication that was sufficient was the thoughts travelling at the speed of dreams. Many called them astropaths, but they were not. They were not bound by soul and had only their own hardened hearts as defence against the sea of madness. A choir of them could, with practice and a lot of effort, broadcast across a handful of light-years. Acting in a network they could maintain a communications web of immense size and complexity with the message relayed from choir to choir.

The other means of communication was to bully, bribe, threaten or mortgage your soul in bargains with the unholy denizens of the Infernal Realms. The only problem being that the recipient had to be strong enough to wrest the message from them and even then the content of the message might have changed during transit. Deamons made untrustworthy servants and fickle allies.

Not all cultures were uniform in their antipathy and loathing of the warp-touched.

The stratocracy of the Krieg Fortress Worlds saw them as the necessity that they were, touched by something malevolent but not themselves sinful. They saw that psykers held themselves constantly with iron hard and unforgiving discipline. They saw them as kin of a sort.

As kin they were afforded the honour of conscription into the Krieg Soldiery upon discovery. Only the wisdom of the Motherworld could be trusted with such power.

The Formosa Imperium, Deliverance Alliance, Ultramar Commonality and many others who saw themselves as the rightful heirs to the Old Imperium maintained its existing Scholastia Psykana schools and life for the psykers under these regimes continued much as it always had; much to their chagrin.

Most of the Forge Worlds were an example in the worst excess in remorseless persecution. It was not deemed logical to allow psykers the freedoms and rights they had enjoyed, minimal as they were, in the old regime. On Helios all naturally born psykers, latent and active, were executed along with their siblings, offspring and parents. Best to remove the mutation down to the roots. Any psychic talent needed could then be grown and controlled utterly by the state incarcerated and in specially enfeebled, drug reliant and sterilized bodies.

Of the mechanicus remnant worlds that chose eternal slumber not one psyker, sanctioned or otherwise, was deemed worthy of awakening in the dream of the age to come.

Only the Jovian Tinker Fleets and the Lathe Worlds allowed the warp-touched to prosper. The former because they were necessary in that nomadic life and necessity can be turned to advantage. The latter because they saw technomancy and psyonic manipulation as just another resource to exploit.

Many of the Forge Worlds, and many other worlds with the technological ability, simply lobotomised their psychic populations. Often this would also destroy their cognitive abilities and left them suitable only for a life of servitorhood they did not deserve. Other times they were just made more amenable; simpletons with useful, broken minds; a pitiful and wretched existence.

Witches of every type often saw the populations of those worlds that fell under the rule of xenos and the ideologies of such outside origins as safe havens. Often this ended badly but not as often as the post-Imperial remnants would have their own people believe. Many of these cultures often welcomed these strange otherworldly immigrants and refugees especially if their own native people lacked such useful abilities.

Foremost amongst these accepting xeno realms were the survivors of the Thexian Trade Empire in their ruins of a once proud and vast hegemony, the Farsight Enclave at the heart of the Tau Graveyard, the Church of the Dracolith and its constant need for translators and always the Slaugth.

Pity the poor wretches who were taken by the maggot-men, the eaters-of-dreams. Better that they had died than endure what horrors were inflicted on them by that kind shunned by even deamons. They had no souls, in every term it is possible to mean that phrase, and the even the putrescence of the Warp in all is insanity would recoil from them and bar them passage. The mortal realm could at least breath easy for this as their FTL ships were far, far slower than even the ships of the Tau. Their blight was spread slowly and they were easier to contain, but not so anymore. By tortures unimaginable, or all too easy to imagine, their agonies were used to tear the sky asunder and grant them passage through the realm infernal. The days grew darker on the western fringe and all knew that it was the psykers who had unleashed that blight upon the innocent.

The gradual drifting of the Khrave into Imperial territory suddenly increased in rapidity far faster than any could have predicted. The devourers of minds had long seen the teeming masses of humanity as the greatest of banquets denied to them and with the hordes of captured psyker slaves and the shattering of the Imperial Guard they had no real resistance to speak of. Once more it was the psykers who were seen as the architects of these predations in the Second Age of Strife. No sane, or even tolerably insane, psyker aided the Khrave willingly as some things sickened even jackals.

The psykers of any of the vassal worlds of the Great Eldar Empire were seen as guard dogs by the Eldar. Loyal hounds to root out sedition amongst the lesser races whom they could walk amongst without suspicion. They were also seen as something akin to a miner's canary in regard to enslaver and deamonic incursions.

Byavoor, freed from the hideous tyranny of the warp-corrupted Yu'vath by the Imperial Angevin Crusade, found themselves at a considerable disadvantage. Generations of enslavement and subtle manipulations and alterations had left them intentionally docile and servile in nature but with intellect intact. They could sense this weakness in themselves and so could the rest of the galaxy who saw them as nothing more than disposable slave labour at best. They remembered the sleeping Strinx, the microscopic silicate organisms that fed on mineral rich asteroids and other low-gravity masses. They remembered how it was the psychically active Yu'vath that had bound them into complex patterns of artificial but powerful sentience and how these intellects possessed everything that had been engineered out of their own.

Young children with psychic talents were abducted from across the breadth of the Calixis Sector in meticulous raids. They were taken to the strongholds of the Byavoor and raised to maturity in an environment that would make them sympathetic to their surrogate families. Upon psychological maturation they were taken, with no small amount of ceremony, to the few surviving Strinx colonies. They stood upon those silver and grey glittering jewels and lost themselves. What emerged was a hybrid mind, not entirely human but of human origin. Knowing all about human pride and defiance and aggression and remembering much of former servitude to the cruel Yu'vath. The Byavoor had created worthy rulers from cast-offs of humanity.

The ancient and unknowable Rashan, or at least their human proxy agents, were active in recruiting the stable warp-touched from seemingly any race that could produce them from early M42 all the way up to the late M44. Some time during the last few decades of M44 they, the entire species, and their agents and new acolytes seemed to vanish from amongst the stars. Where they went and why can only be guessed at, as is the purpose to which they needed several billion of high-grade psykers.


	11. Chaos Contested

The other side of insanity was not immune from the torments of a galaxy inimical to any sort of kindness, just as the realm of mortality was not untouched by their own turmoil.

Where did the Great Game change? It could not be attributed to a single occurrence across a galaxy in turmoil.

Colourful beings in glittering gracefulness appeared to an old, old king who knew his realm was destined to die. In exchange for his sword of Dawn his kingdom would be spared the swarm of locusts that devoured all. His realm was overlooked, a morsel falling between fingers of the ravenous to dwell in mournful solitude amongst the ashes of a trillion dead.

Theft of a corpse from those who called the stars their home, but the carcass was not whole. Those who paid it homage and listened to its whispers knew it was never truly dead for it had never truly lived for all that it had boasted.

Death's visage was devoured a moment before incarnation as Her sorrows fell like soft raindrops upon hearts of cold bone where the dead hid in fear. Grey and cold but better than the Hell their ancestors had damned them to, Heaven was empty with its gates rusted shut.

Beast did look upon ancient nobility and found it wanting and abhorrent. It was a forgotten memory that found forgotten children and indifferent deities shrugged of the sleep of eons to carry from where they were interrupted. It was revelry for the fallen disciples of the mirror image god but also a time to wait.

Wandering the wastes and gardens a polished chrome Knight has only the whispers of the monochrome Outcast for company. They both were poisonous in their own way to each other and themselves but more to those around them in places where places could not be. One was Horror to one who could not feel it and the other was purpose to something that neither desired nor required it. For all that they were not they were more alike than either could ever imagine, united in antipathy and mutual loathing.

A Joker and a Trickster faceless in tatters and rags and a young girl's dress but which was the dog and which of them was guiding the other is anyone's guess. Riddles that turned upon themselves like knotted string in a maze of muddled meanings and twisted impossible madness but still less winding than the archives in the library once called home. For all his weakness and grief he could not be caught for he was a nimble dancer to clumsy giants who was considered beneath notice until one of four lay dead and dismembered. By then it was far too late for their rule to remain undisputed as more worthy denizens contested Hell.

A cat's-paw in a cruel city of stolen suns and crueller dreams finds that puppets can pull the strings of their masters and usurp the seats of presumptuous tyrants. A doorway opened by a broken-hearted heartless marionette for things that had no reason being in such a place. All the while impossible children of impossible unions were opening doors for things that had no place in any place. Even the most debased of those old sinners would recoil from the things the other side of that barrier for they were ņ̶̬̞̲̟͎͓̦͙̗͚͓̦̹̳͍̀̓̅̐͒ͮ̑͊ͥͧ́͊͘a̵̧̡͉̯͚̘ͮ̈ͥ̿̿ṁ̴̵̠̮̙͛̏̓̔̎ͫ̐ͦ͝ͅe̴͍͉̪̫͚̰̙͇͕̬̪̻̪̤͚̥̜̩̣͗͋̇͛͠ļ̵̒̒ͦ͒ͮͥ͊ͮ͏̸̧̝̞͈̟͕̝̫͙̤͉͇̲̪ę̧̦̭̬̯̱͔̺̤ͣ̅͒ͧ̌̎̿̓ͣͤ̿̈͘ͅs̛̱̭̰̤̳̬̳̼̯̙͔̭̘͚̗͎̪̯ͫͩͨͯͫ̂̀̅̿́ͥ̀̊ͤͤͦ̃̚͘͟͠͡s̺̞̝̦̩̬̩̙͍͍̥͕͈̤͔̩͙̙̪͂̓̑̆́̌͑͆͑͒̈̓͒ͯͥ͆͡͠͞ ͗ͭ̇ͤ̇̊̐̊͋̔ͥ͗͐҉̢̖̞̘̖̭̣̭̝̻͙̫̘̰̤̩̯̜͝tͤ̅̔̒̏͠͏̡̜̙̫̞͍̱̼͕̦̭̪͍͞͡h̵ͯͭ͛ͬ̈́̋ͦ̅͗ͦͣͤ҉͜҉̴̖̲̜̬̟̰̭̗̹̤͚͙͙̩ȋ̶̷͆́ͨͬ̔ͫͮ͢҉͎͙͕̥͇̻̥n̶̵͓͉͙̭͙̞̙̬͇̱͎̭̤̠̱̘͆͋͌̿̑̏̅̉͊̋́̉̂̀̈̚͜͝g̛̭̺͙̯̠̙͖̮̖̱͉̼̖̉̑ͬ̓̍͋ͩ̀̚ͅš̴̶̓̋ͬ̿ͥ̽̍͗ͩ̍҉̝̗̜̠̼̠͓̝͓̞͕͢ ̷̸̟̲͖̮͔͇̐͛ͤ͊̈̐̚͢͝ the gods of old shut fast beyond the doors of the Blacksmith. Yngir was not what was remembered, not what was associated with that word in latter times by other inheritors. N̩͇͖͎̺̑͑ͮ̇̓͝ā̇҉̞m̯̺̳̻̞̬͢e̐͌͞s̙̊ ̛ͩͧ͌̎ͦ͛̒o̞̝͐ͧ͋̂ͨ̂̓f ̮̯͉͈͉͖͐̑̓ͬṱ̥̞͖̱̮ͨ̀̋̈́ͪh͉̝̰̯̎͊͠i̥̠̣̎ͯ̒n̄ͭĝ̟̗̺͎ͯ̀s͈͖͕̓̌͂̾ͫ̐ ̻̫͔̞̟͕̅͜t̳͔̬͓̰͌ͥ͞ͅh͎̔̏̊̄̚a̖̬̦̹ͬ̏ͦͣtͨ͋͛̐ͥͪ ̠̻͙̮͂̈́̆̋̄̅ḛ̯̒͐v̢ͦͦͯ̓̀̀̍e̍ͩ̌n̠̂̄̀ͫ̏ͣ ̒͋̒t͍ͨͯ͡h̨̩̹̳̘̲̒̎̐ͯ́ͤe͚͓̠̖̗̜̖͊͂̎͒ ͎ͪ̒̎ͨn͖̼ͪ̍̄e̗̹̜̖ͫ̃ͫvͤ̀͌̿̅ȩ̼̰͖̝̱̠ͅr̶̓̔̾-͎̦̥͇̾ͣ̃͌̉b̠̳͈̋͡o̩̪̹̭̤ͦ͘r̼̺͐ͬͩͫn̶̩͂̌̋̇ ̬͉̻͇͈͍͐ͥ̂̃̈́w̲͑̈́͆̾ͫ́͠oͧṵ̻̼͍̼̄̈́͌̾̇͑̀̕l̤̲͚ͦd̲̻̜̼͇̂͒̓̊̈̌̔ͅ ̷̠̮͔̃̀ͤ̃n̩̩ͩͥeͪ̀ͦ̎v͉͇̣̬̞̺͖̓̍̓͞ẹ͚͓͎̮͓̈́͠r̂̄̿ͧ̐҉̣ ̸̙̝̜̼͎̩͐̈̅̂ͪ̒̽s̹̣̪̮͚̦̄ͧ͞p͋͏̼ẽ͊̎͒͏͉a̪̪̬̖̮̪̞͐̀ͬ̓̽̏́͢k̻̦͍͕̰͍ͤ̏ͣͧ͐̕.͕̖͖̲̫͌

N̵̨̳͍̠͗͑̽͑̚ơ̦͎̩ͥ̽̓̽͛̏̚͘ͅñ͈͇͖̮̙͖̩͍̀̓ͫ̃͝e̐̇̉͋̿̄̚҉̞̻͉̗͎̱̞͎̀ ̨̮̤̭̊̀̏̋̔̍̾ͧ͞c̷̢͖̣͓̬͙͔ͦ̉̚o̴̙̺͉̪̦͋̾̾́̾̈ͯ̊u̥̗͕̖͚͍̾͒͊̐̑͗̚̚̕͡l̰̰̻̱̙ͣͩͫͯ͒͝ḑ̶̤̻̟ͧͯͩ́̄̓̚͘ ̴͓͇͊̓ͭ̊̑̔h̸̨̡̜̱͕̦̫͇ͯa̶̶̱̝͗̌͊͛͌ͅͅv̛͖͔̍ͩ͑̒̾̊ͧe̹̗̠̼̅ͅ ̨̨͚̫̦̄ͯ̿̂͛̽̌k͓͉̖̩ͦͫͨ͗ͤ̾ͩ͑n̻̫͙̻ͭ͐̕ǒ̫̱͍͚̯̳̬ͪ̐̀͐͋̑̚͟w̒̀͏̥͔̞̻̼ͅñ̢̥͒͘͘,̘͚̤̘̠͉̫ͭ͢ ̧̬͓̖̝̮̦̳̲̀n͖̬͍̖̞̳̲͈̆̒̉ỏ̶̘̖͚̆̊͆ͣ̈̀t̵ͫ̅͌͋ͣ̒̐͢҉͙̹̥͇͍͎̜̦ ̨͙̓̆ͭ͆̏͆͟i͚̪͇̖͖̖̣ͤ̑͊̕n̖̮̯̙̭͍̅̑̒̿͆ͣ̀ ̤͔͎̃ͤ͐͋ͤ̅̌͘t̢̢͙͓̉̐ͫ̈́͑ͨ̕h̡̛̦̰͚̤̖̪̣̔̒̑o̼̮̖̦̺̤̎̈͞s̥͈̣̲͉̖̹͐̾͋̾͛̈́̌̾̎e̼̠͈̺̗̻͓͛̑̇̊ͤ̌̾͞ ̤̘̙̆̓̇ͫ̓̿̽t̡͇̯̗̳̺͖̞̻͗̋̓̓͊̽̄͂ͬ͘i͌̑͛͂̌̒͋͏̦̝̖̘̰̪͙̕m̘͓̻͕͚͑͌͑̉͐̀̅͜͡ͅe̷̡̘͇̖͎͔̯̤͛̌̃͂͜s̷̨̱͚̯͔͚̎ͩͭ̀,̧̤̤͖̭̤̩͎̣͇͊̿̀͟ ̻̤̾̎͂ͮ͛́ͪ͜n͓͍͕̣͒͋̏̓̈ͤ̍͠ȯ̶͎̬̝̙̥̀͋̀t̫̞̦͚͓͚͔̯̟ͮ͗̎̓͌̔̀ͨ̿ ͈͇̯̪̣̩̦ͣ͒ͥ͐̈́͜f̵͇̣̣̓̓̈̀̿͘̕ǫ̶̙̼͕͉̠̪̻͉̆̿r͎̳̯ͪ̃̈́ͧ̈́̍ͪͣ ̄̈ͯͧ͒͏̠̰̪ä̹̳̖̰̺̝̭͚́͛̄͐̽ͫͅn̼͚̞̪͔̣͓ͬ͆̍̉ͯ̚ ̤͍̋ͤ̽aͬͪ̊ͧ͂ͥ҉̙̞̟͖̲͕̹͢ͅg̵̞̞̫̻̊ͩ̅͘͞ė̶̮̜̬̝͍̣͇͓̐ͤͬͯͫ̓́̕,̦̣͍͕̜͖̎̚ ̼͖̪̻̥̰͚̲ͭ͒͞w̩͓̥͙̞̬̣͂͊͒ͥ̃ͨḧ̢͓̱̘́ͣa̞͈̪̝̔t̷̻̪̲͖͍̖̝͂ͣͯͯ̃ͨ̆ͣ́ ̡̠̖̘̌͊̓͢tͭ́̂̋̌ͦͭ҉͈̘̰̜h̨͍̦̳̪͉̭̭̬̀ͮͯͨ̋̎͂̏e̛͉͛̾ͩ̏͑͟͡ḯ̧͙̤̘͇̖͔͑͘͟r̭̖͕͖̝̖̜̭͗͞ͅ ̶͉̳̀̇̎ͤͩd̛͔̤͈ͤ́r͌̎͛ͨͪ̊̍͑҉̞eͮ́͋ͩ͒̋҉̙̭a̻̩̼̤͋̈́̀ͅm̨͔̣̳̪̱̳͖̖̆͂͗̍̑ͥ̄̄s̻͈͓̮̰̺̟͒̏̏̓̉̓͆ͯ͠ ̷̯̪̖͉ͦ̓́͌ͪͨͨ̚̕͜o̴̳̙͖̰̻͙͚ͯ̀ͬͬ͋̈́̚ͅf̴̯̞̥͎̱̞͛̋ͪ̽̔ͣ̊͜ ̰̺̮̘ͩ̓͌͊̍ s͇̙̮͎̹̗̳̋u͖̣̻̟͍͌͑̒s̺͚̟ͪͧ͑ͦͩ̑t͚̩̋̍̊̈́à͕͚̙͎̿͑̓̓͐i͎͎͈̻̋n̖̦͉̻̲̘ͦ̎̐ͮ͂͒ȇͥͪḓ̯͓̳͙̗̳ ̞͚̅̔̑̽a̿̉̈͂̃͗n̬͍͕̱̮̆d̈́̔͊ͪͩ ̤̓̄̿͒u̥͔̣͚̾ͮͫ͊ñ̪̃͆̃ͯ̎ṛ͉̝̪̊ͥ̈́ẽ̌͒ͩ̌m̮̳͕̦͚̫i͕̮͛ͮ̒̎̿t̪̬̘̰͇̃͛t͕î͊̇͑̚n̯̟ͪ͂͛͗̊g͈͙͕̪͍͕͐ ̥̟͓̗̬̌ͯ͒̌͗ͦͣc̤͓̥͔̬̝͕̅ͯͤ͌ͣͤṙ͚̜̥͖͍͕̫ͨ̋ű̹̘̙̼͔͊̋e̬͚͓͕̠̮̱͆̎͊l̼̝̗̗̑̂̄̂̚t̬͍̘͋ͪͅy̼̟̖̘̖͆ ̺͔͔̞͎̹̝͛̍͒ͤh̥̦̺̮ͧ͋ȃ̠̯̟͍̭͍̻͌͗ͤ̿̓ď͉̥̌̐͒ͮ̏ ̪̗̞͖͔̖̈́͒͛ͪͥ͐b͔̹̬͍̪͎o͈͉͎̣̤̝r̫̞̔͛ͮ̅̚n̖̹͙̫͉ͭ̐̅.̓̆ͪ̄͋͗ͅ ̦͇̖̖̻͛ͮͦͨ̅ͪN͎̯ͦ͑o͈͍̟̰̫̤̊n̠̠̏̅ͭ̽ͯͪ̓e͖̲͉̭̱͕ ̘̫̲̯̙ͣ͂̆̅̎k͈̠̗̦͚̥̹ͬñ͓̲̣̊ͨ͂ͤͭͯe͎̮̮͓ͦ̔̑̇̈́̅ͫͅw̜͇̥̪͕̒͌ ̬̱̟̣͇ͮͭ͊b͈͓̩̬̞͓̐̌͊́ͣu͕͖̮̖͔̍̉t̩̞̹ͣ̔ͬ͂̽͌ ̜̲͐̽̇ͮt͍̤̤͈͎̲͖ͭo̝̥͚̭̠͎̣ ̼̲̠̣͇̲̮͒͐͂ͯ͂a̞͇̅͑n̽̿ ͭ̉ͭe̟͆͛͛̊x̜̗̝͈̮ͨ͐͂ṭ̦̯̟͚̊͊ë̘̹̭́͗͐ͫͬn͎̲̻̝͍̱͕ͣ̋̈́ͮ͒ͤ̆t̳̠͉̪͈̭͎ͥͦ͋̑ͫ ̯̳̈̍̀ȧ͖͔͇͎̦̯̿ͪͨ̚ͅl̬̲̩͚̝̫͖ͮ͊l̩̗͚̤̟̫͉͐ ̤͙̣̦̙̬f͔̪͔̜̠̺̲̿̌̌ͮ́̐e̜̘̼̦̮ͦ̿ͨḷ̼ͥ͊͗͆͌ͥṫ̥͍̌ ̰͇̥̙̌̅ R̵̸̲͇̠̣͙̱̬͓͔̳̘͎̭͎͇͓͂̉̽̾ͭ̓̽̔ͅĥ̶͙̞̻͙̺̭͕̼͎̺̠̮͔̮̓̓ͪ̈́̆̋̑͂̉̒ͨ̋͛̀̚̕͘͢a̡̯̫̙̹̯̗͚̖͛̈́͌̇͋ͧ̋̐ͩ̃̇ͬ̽ͨ͆͂̔͝͞n̓ͯͮ̈́ͭͪͫ̅ͩ͒̔̇̚̚҉̨̻̲̮̼̤ḁ̵̢͙͈͕̩͓̣̱̳̰̟̱ͪ̈̅ͤͧ̌̄̀͡ ͉̻̳̻̙̱̹̩̱͉̲̰͇̗ͬ͒ͪͤ͐̈́̓͌́̅ͨ̅͗͟͡D͔̱̤̺͖̩̙̤̮̓͛̒̓͆͋̄̾ͨ͒̽̓̎̏̀͢a̞̻͕̮̪̥͖̘͉̽ͤ̋̎͌̌ͥ̈̓̈́̇̋̚͢͠͝n̵̛̼͚͉̠̯̠͂̃̑̃̒ͣͪ̑ͦ̏͋̚͜d̈́̆ͩͨ̒̆̓̈́ͬ̚҉̶̨̮̤̲̩̟̻̠̳̼̯̩̺ͅr͙̟͕̙̜̞̤̩͙̤̹̟̦̖̤͉̙̖̅ͣ̋̓ͪ̏ͣͬ̔̈́̈̌̑͋̓͘͡ą̴̷̡̯̝̼̣̣̮̙͎͇̘̠̘̈́͊̿̂ͩ d͕̦͈̩̘̺r̫̬̼a̠̬̲̟̟̥w̩̰i̩̪̮̬̦̻ń͖̪̻͔̻̝̹ģ͖̙͎ ͈̖̤i̛t͉͓̺͉̹̤̜́s̭̟̝̯ͅ ̙̠̝͖̻͇̣͟b̬̯̪͙͕̦r̛̭̻͎͙̖̜e̛͙̘a̲͖̼̳͓̪̭͞th̻̬̘͖̺,̱̞͖͔̙ ̼̤͓̥̬t͟ḩ͓̪ȩ̘ ̵e̡̫͙̫̠n̰͝d̠͇ ҉̟̟t̬̪i̺̯̯me͈͎̥̭̺͎͙ś͈̱̥̞͙.̙̪͠ ͎̙ͅA̙ ̧s̠͇͠p͏̻̬͉͕̫̮l̨̤̯a͈͔̲̜̺t̷̹̬̗͕̮t̗͓̥̯ͅe̺̙r҉̞ ̬̬̠̤͎̝̤̀o͉̺̳̩f͍͍͈̫͜ ̶̪̪͔̟̗b̞͢l̪̦̭͕̮o͚o͎̯ͅḑ͔̤̗̩ ̶ǫ̺͙̥̰̺̜n̶̼̜̪̗ ͉̱t̰̣h̖̫͚͖̞̀e̪͓̜̮ ̤̠̤̕t͙h͙̪͇͕̤̙̜͢r̦̻̤͖̺̦̕ͅe̴͍a̪̮͉̟͓̪̟͢d͇͙̘̰̝̖ ̴̹̮̪̠̬̰̖ó̻f̴̬ ̀t̫̯̳̙̱͔i̛͇̱̗m̩̦͚͍̀e͇͇̼̦̞ ̣̹̝ ḻ͙͌̋ͮ̽ͯe̹̬̙ͪ̀͠a̛̦̞̣͖ͥͣ̊̓ǩ̮̅̽͜i̲͎̒ͯ̉̇͋ń̪͕̜̬͇̹͖ǵ̯͈͖̻̖͉ͥ͐̐ͮͬ ̞͘b͙͊̈́͐̇̎̿̽ā̊̄̇͑ͪc̲̝̪̓̚k̜̜̿̎̂́ͥ̀w̺͓̥̰̙͑̄̓̚̚a̵͚̅̌̀̐r̓͂̋͛̚͘d̝̱̹̱͙͌̄ͨ̉ͦ́s͍͈̜̣͕̲͇ͭ͆̅ͤͫ̅ ͧ̈̽ͯ̇̈́a̐n̙̺̠ͮͧd͍̰͓ ͚͇̬̯̜͕̲͆͜c̡̾̂̆̌͗ͮ̓ȁ̟̗̤̥͊ͨͥ̎͌ͪr͉̺̠̲̭̔̉̓r̗̘ͧ͠yͬͭi̼̣̮̬̟̒͂̋̔̈́̅̋n͈͑ͤ̈g̚҉͕̬̠̲̳ͅ ̡̦̫ͣͮn̟̗͎̘͙̈́ͬͥͫ̌̒͂ͅȉ̪̻̓͜g̜̖̔ͦ̔̑ͣh̰̰̝̘ͮͭ͂͒͒̆ͨt͎͉̀̿̈́ͧ̎̄m̢̘͍̟͇͆ͬ̆̎̃aͫ̉r̥͖̜̩̞̟̉ͯ̀͘eͧ̉ͣ̆s̨̯̮̠ͪ͛ͭ̐ͨ̈́̓ ̝͇͚͉̙̰̘o̥̲̞͕̫̠̝̽ͨ͑ͣ̉ͯ̈f̯̞̈̈́̎ ǐ̼̼̻͚̙̫̄͗t̶͙̘̞͚̥̃̃́̀̑s̗͔̒e̡̖̐̿̈̏̓̉̚l̸͇̖̼̮̝̱̻͑̍̿̀f̨̲͂̅̉̒̔̄ͯ ͈̼̰̺̼̗̄̔̿̌̂ͮ͗̕i̟̯͌͌n͓̖̹͈͖ͥ̀ͯ͗͗ ͉͒ͦ̎w̜̳̃̔ͫ̆ạ͕ͧ͒ͣr̷̭̺̖̜n̸̗ͦͯͣ̋iͬ́ͧ͒̃̚n̟̪͖̿ͭ͢g̢̗̈ͩ ̳̹͍͈̪̣̅̔̆͐̊̐̏t̟̍͂̽͆͜o̰̤͔̻̿̆ͭ ͎̬̪̫̏͂ͩ̈ͬ̿̓͟ṱ̜̊ͥ̋̚͜h͖̥̾o̸͖̞̘ͣ̃ͫ̎s̻͔̿̓e̳̐͂ ̡̻̦̀ͬ̓̓w̴̖̝̠̪̹̳̏ͦ̅̈́̒h̲̠̲͚͓̜͑ͮ̂̒̚͘ọͩͯ̊̄͌͐ͮ͢ ̥̯̙͎̦͙ͨ̓c̷̜̠͓̯̥̤a̞̰̠͆ͫ͒ͩ̚m̵͖̂͛̾̓́e̸̲͍ͬ̅͗ͥ ̧͖͎ͭ̍̿ b̹͕̱̥̲̭͖͙͍̪͖̦e̯͚͕̙f̲̠̰̝o̲̰͖̣̱̺͔̬̩̥̩͕̜̮̲̩̤̤r̺̲̠͍̟̪̯͓̙̭̳̥̩̭e̩̰̫̺̭̞̼̯̹̜̤̟̟̩͇ͅ.̻̯̖̯̦̪̭ ͖͕̙͇͍̖̼͚͇͇̰̭̥͙I̻̱͕̦͚̬͖͈̹̰̣̳̫̯ͅn͍̜̜͎̬̰̠̳̯̣̟͎̖̟̤̰ͅ ͉̬̥͔a̺̬͇͎̱̭̱̺̻͈̱̞͈ ̯͖̱̘̩̖͍u͇̯̳̪̗̺̱̠̬͕͍̱͓̟̤̻̙n̘͔̬̦͇̤̻̮̜i͔̩̤͕͎̜̻̥͚̙̞̱̳̯͉̣ͅv̜͎̗̯͖̙̼͖̦̘ͅͅe̱̯̻̼̱̯̺̦͓̻̟̱͇̪̯ͅr̳͉̱̠̭̜̠̟̭͕̖̣͈̪̱̮̫s̮͚̟̰e̤͉̟̣̹ ̤̜̩̞̝̤͖̙͖͉͕̮f̹̟̝u̱̼̭̲͕̜͈͕͙̘̤̖l̲̤̙̭͉͕͙͖̳̦̭̰͕͉͙̘̥l͙̫̦̬̺͔͖̞̘͍̜̺͇̫̠͎ͅ ̳̮̼̮̻̪̱̭̦̺̰͓̹̜̯̘̱̲̥a͇͔̥̻̟̱͎̦̟̤l͉̦̟͙̻͚͖͇r̹̤̦͖̜̻͕̪͎e͈̗̰̝͕̫͕̪̤̞̭̤͔̩ͅạ͚̠̟̝̭̝̺͔̼͖͖͎͚̯̥ͅd̟͓̪̲̪̗̜̟̖̯̞̳̳͎̜̙y͎͎̮̮̖͕̥̟͕̦͕̝͓̝ ̝͎̪͓͓̥̼̦̠̱̞͔o̥͍̹̮̤̙͚͎̲͈̪͉͍̰̟ͅf̪̯̜͖͚ ̳͓̲̬͓͚̮̗͎̻ͅn̟̰͕̱̺͈̹͕̗̣̘̹͍̗̪i̙̜̣̰̘g̣̬̮̳̥̙̯̗̭̜͙̟͚͖̘͕͖̲̩h͉̥͕̳̭̖̱̣̯̰̗͇t͚̺̭̼̘͍͚͎ͅm̮̙̹̭͓̲͖a͉̤̬̮̳r͈̱̟̟͇̯̠̮̭̝̼͇̣͕̳̘e̫̥͕̥̺̻͇͍͔s̝͍̦̙͇͍̬̳̦͔̗̫̼ ̰̬̣͓̗͕̜̩̝̗̮͔̫̮̤͚a̲̬̲̥͈̱̝͙͈͔̪͉̲̞͕̻̦͇p̥̞̖͚͎̻̫̥̹͖̹̠ͅl͎̳͙̝̳̗̺e̳̼̤̫ṇ̞͕̘̯̱̪̰̼̻̜̜̥̪̭̭t̼̬͖̞͙̹y͔̝͓͕̙̤̻͓ ̜̳̯͇n̤̫̠͔͓͍̺̠͙̤̯̭̗̠o̗͔̼͙̳͍̘̪̣͙̘̙̯̘ͅn̗̺̲̱̤̰̝̫̩̬͍͙̭ͅe̠͈̲̮͇͉̱̥̟͈̫̘̮̝͉̻̟ ̬͔̤̪̫̩͕h̼̰̖͈͙͔̠̤̹̖̬͎e̥̮̩ḛ͓̣̮̫̜̙d͖̣̞̼̱̬̙̮̮̞̗͇̮̣̤ͅe͓̮̫̜ͅd̳̣̤̙̲̗̼͙̤̳̯̖͕̘̺̩͓̱̱ ̝̠͇͓̹̘̰̪̜t̜̰̯͖̺̝͎̠͚h̫̝̫̘̗̱̦̲̫͖̭̯̣̟̜͖e̙̩͙͕͙̮͙͖͙̪̖̣̳̝̺ͅs̫͍̙̝̻̖̠̦̰̱̖̻̟e̩̥̱̘̞̪ ̦͇̜̞̗̦̪̣̞͈͇̘̠̹͙͎̱͚ͅd͚̘̤̦̼͉̦̬̟̳̬̟̜̺͖ͅi̜̱͈͎̝̯̰̫̗͈͚ͅr̥̲̘̹̯͙̮̘̤̻̳͙̥͙̜e̘̙̘̦̟͉̼̜̥̦̪̣̥̫̳͎͎ͅ ̪̼͖̗͓̯̮̙̼͍͈̠̦̩̫o̦͔̠̝̣̹̩͈͍̝̯̺͎̲͕̞ͅm̙̰̥̝̲͙̯̪̘ͅe̻̤̺͓͎̫͙̥n̘̭̹̺̘͈̗̥̬̹̳̪̰̝͚͕̯̲s͇̝̠̰ͅ.̟̖͈̼

The hammers day and night with out either sun or stars struck the anvil to shape the things of inventive pain and constructed torment as souls eternally burned in furnace fires as tribute to a sacrifice for personal gain. Those petty and hateful twisters of the Machine-gods aspects never knew that their anvil had once belonged to more skilled and maimed hands. They never knew where he hid or who had become his new priesthood and disciples and what name he adopted.

The gods are not infallible and genocide was left incomplete.

The godless ones left orphan found gods of their own but it was from the suffering of the godless people that the gods were created. Bleeding heart and soul and hope and hate and sorrow as they and their false gods waged war upon a race of near immortals in the time before.

Three there were in the opening acts of the Great Game and three and a fourth who in exile dwelt. Serpents on thrones in a blasphemous Eden whose fangs dripped poison into the well at its heart. Sad little things in those days with so few to offer up in sacrifice. But they poisoned the Eldest and the First from their war they created others weaned on blood and strife and the flames of a hate to foreshadow and overshadow all hate to come. It was glorious.

As the false god perished and his birthworld was swallowed into a sinkhole of his own shattered ego older creatures in service to an older fraudster found in his death rattle all that they needed.

Across the craftworlds a dead god cried out in frustration, his hands were idle and stained in blood that was not from the victim he truly desired. He of mischief, perhaps in hope or perhaps in gratitude or perhaps for no other reason than he could, heeded this long held bitter rage. At his behest the servants whose minds dwelt in the past were shown the future how it should not be and were told how best to dance around it. Can it really be called grave robbing if the corpses march so willingly from their sepulchres?

A world descended down a hole in the sky aptly named the Bottomless Pit. It was a garden, once, long since dead from neglect and negligence by its keepers and utterly brought to ruin by the hubris and vanity of the mortal who would try to walk with those infinitely greater.

Welded together in the fires of hate the composite and broken god staggered and stumbled from the stolen doorway flanked on all sides by the legions of dark mirth. Things beyond number or reason flocked to them like moths to flame and were cut down with ease. Things from further a field closer to the places that never-were, the could-have-been and the things that dwelt in the places that the gods can't see were drawn to them as the planet eternally plummeted further from reality. Though they cut bloody swathes through the ranks of things that should not be but it was like fighting the tide. Their numbers were finite; their foes were innumerable and immortal.

As the giant of blood rusted iron collapsed onto that impossibly tarnished golden throne he looked up to the stars and into his own labouring heart, the heart shared by all of his people.

But he was Kaela Mensha Khaine he did not look to them in kindness. His hands dripped with their blood and they deserved it. He hated them, hated them for making him too weak, for pitting him against Kaelis Ra and allowing him to suffer infection, for their ill-timed defiance, for creating a new and more devastating creature than he ever was but most of all he hated them for killing his siblings. But he needed them as much as they needed him.

Reaching out he felt a great and writhing sea of hate that mirrored his own. The Eldar, in their presumption, had thought to craft a surrogate god to replace their slaughtered pantheon. A god of the dead, born of all the shared suffering and sorrow they had endured across the breadth of time. A great amalgamation of the restless dead and they called it Ynnead. But the dead did not lay quiet. They wanted to hurt as they had been hurt, they wanted to stand tall over their tormentor and when begged for mercy have none to give. They wanted to humble and disgrace a god before proving just one more time that the gods, regardless of their own opinion on the matter, are mortal.

Sitting upon that stolen throne on a world plummeting into the depthless abyss his roars of rage acted as an ethereal lightning rod as Ynnead was bled from the Infinity Circuit. All of the hate and sorrow and loss and the shear need to inflict retribution channelled down to that one iron colossus.

White hot and wrathful he blazed in the spectrum of loathing and violence. The harlequins fled at the sight of him, giggling and sniggering as they cut and slashed and danced their way back towards the pilfered gate. Thousands of them lay dead in the service of their god, but millions were victorious.

With the honour guard gone the deamons of the Deep Warp descended upon the resplendent god of murder. They were brief entertainment. He strode through the battle like he did in ancient days, merriment in blood-drenched delirium.

By his will the planet finally broke its arrested fall and plunged into the warp proper. Khine the Bloody Handed was home.

The Great Game was eternal, but now it had new contestants. As the Orks looked upon their ancient foes they began to remember what they had been. The knowledge was bone deep and flowed through their very veins and having remembered it could not imagine how they had ever forgotten. As one the orks the galaxy over awoke form the waking slumber.

The brawling of Gork and Mork across the formless wastes was a thing to behold. Slaanesh tried to distract one or both of them with unimaginable sensations and unholy pleasures from the hidden sanctums of her garden. She was ignored. Tzeentch tried to manipulate them with cunning ploys and barbed bribes. He was ignored. Nurgle sent forth fevers and plagues to torment them and show them the futility of their existence. He was ignored.

Khorne could not, would not, be ignored and sent a great horde of blood dripping maniacs into the wastelands to hunt down these presumptuous, half forgotten, relics. Sadly the deamon that, almost certainly by accident, ended up at the head of the horde was the perpetually ill-fated Skarbrand.

The mirrored gods towered above the horde like brawling mountains beneath a burning broken sky. As the unending roar issued from the maw of Skarbrand he became aware that his foot was caught in something.

The last memories of Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka were those of glorious combat on the world of Armageddon locked in mortal combat with a most worthy of foes. Now he was somewhere different. But there was a battle going on and so it was still home.

Skarbrand pried the metal claw from around his foot and held up the creature for hateful inspection. The creature then promptly surprised him by head butting him and yelling "Wat da zog iz dat?!". All round the formless wastes in the footsteps of the slaughterer's army terrible and unholy green thing were rising from death into glorious and eternal war. The orks had invaded the Realm of Chaos.

For the first time in eternity Khorne rose from his brass and bone throne and the ork pantheon became a warrior's trinity as Khorne joined the eternal brawl.

All was not well in the labyrinths of Tzeentch. A hundred ploys played out in every heartbeat of his vast and insanely complex realm. A thousand schemes hatched and million plans to usurp his throne and a hundred times that to ensure that it remained most assuredly his.

And yet something was not as it should be. Something was moving through his realms. Something unaccountable. Tzeentch and his heralds were creatures of scheme and strategy where the ability to account for and control all knowable variables was incalculable power and power was the means to more. But something was not right. Like a great tapestry with one too many loose threads all of the schemes of internal struggle were unravelling into discord. His rule was being disrupted, his authority challenged. Another god was abroad in his glittering crystalline realm.

Although the cards can be stacked and fixed in any game the Joker always grins and the Jester was no fool. For all that The Great Sorcerer represented a transition of states and relentless ambition his opposite in all to many was The Great Harlequin who existed only to see such ambition humbled and the schemes of others fail for no reason beyond simple amusement.

With intellect beyond any possible human understanding the Sorcerer divined patterns in the actions of the Harlequin and elaborate traps were placed. Each and everyone of them was avoided by the most simple of means; usually by being absent or tricking one of Tzeentch's own minions into being ensnared in his place.

Slaanesh smelt a morsel, a most exclusive delicacy, that had been denied her for far too long. With all the self-restraint that had earned the god of excess his title she launched a full-scale attack on the crystal labyrinth. The Joker was already gone.

Through the blasted wastes and the places of the damned the dancer danced his little dance and left a pretty trail. Across seas of fire and skies of frost could be found his footsteps. Blood drenched he capered across the hellscapes of Khorne's killing grounds around the Brass Citadel and staged false attacks and misdirected insults that ignited internecine civil wars and mutually detrimental battles. The carefully contained gladiatorial wars being fought to earn the prize of regency to Khorns throne were thrown into utter disarray and from this bedlam arose Doombreed for his sheer tenacity and the cunning only a mortal was capable of. Across the Formless Wastes he stirred up great flocks of furies a billion strong that blotted out the unlight of impossible suns. He danced before the gates of the Soul Forge and mocked the artificers and weapons smiths that dwelt within as he waltzed between the cumbersome legs of Defilers and Soul Grinders and less nameable things. As the weapon smiths of that infernal workshop whipped themselves into a frenzy an old acquaintance of the dancer looked out from his hiding place and smiled. Through the burning streets of the Impossible City of he capered around the butchery of the Outcast and the Lost.

Always he was hounded by the hordes of She Who Thirsts. But he was the Cegorach, the Laughter and the Spite, and he was too nimble to catch.

Until his insane wanderings led him to the Forests of Nurgle. The forest floor was thick with the cloying muck of decay and all actions became sluggish and listless. Spores and the stench of death sapped the life out of everything and the dance slowed to a stagger. For the first time She Who Thirsts had left her throne to pursue this errant morsel for the death of a rival god demanded it.

The deranged hordes of slathering deamons fell to infighting and strife amongst themselves in those foetid swamps and with every savage wound inflicted the noisome waters caused infection.

Half exhausted and drenched in malodorous stagnant filth the Laughing God staggered and clawed his way onwards towards the crumbling mansion of Nurgle. As he crawled up the entropy slope he knew his task was futile as the laws of exponential decline made his efforts quickly ineffectual. And something was following him with surer strides.

A cloying stench of some unholy perfume and the mocking laughter that had heralded the fall of his kin. Slaanesh had caught up to him. A clawed hand reached forth to pluck that most sought after morsel from the wormy earth to feed a dreadful appetite. The hand stopped, Cegorach was grinning.

"I am the Joker and the Dancer and the Spiteful Laughter. Who do you think is going to have the last laugh here you upstart little harlot?" The cruel sneer of derision drained from the hermaphrodite deities face as heavy footfalls began to get closer.

Khine could not be stopped by the filth of the boggy forest and the putrid orchards. Courtesy of Kaelis Ra only molten metal now flowed through his white-hot veins under burning iron skin. His was a furnace heat powered by the cold hate of trillions of the near dead. Deamons, the brighter ones at least, backed off from him and the terminally stupid were cut down in very short order. The ground burned and baked in his footsteps and all about him was the stillness of death.

"I have waited long for this day, slayer of Eldanesh." Screamed the Prince of Excess as she lunged at the murder god. Slaanesh was slapped aside mid-flight with a burning cold handprint scar to blemish her once perfect face.

Khine was not impressed and did not stop. He drew the Blade of Dawn and tore a ragged wound in Slaanesh's throat in a spray of garish blood. As the lifeblood of an unwanted deity flowed away Cegorach rose back to his feet. He looked into the eyes of Kaela Mensha Khaine and for the first time in eternity the bloody handed god felt happy and both of them knew that they had a lot more in common than they would ever admit.

Cegorach bowed and exited the stage.

One dance was over and another stage was opening elsewhere. Such was the nature of the Harlequin.

Looking down at the prone god Khine felt only disgust. A lot of it was at himself for being weak enough to have ever fallen victim to such a travesty but mostly he saw the fall of his old realm and what it had become and that disgusted him further. With a jackals grin upon his iron face he began to methodically slice and cut the god of excess into small pieces. Those pieces seeped into the soft earth and, like corpse filth from the bottom of a coffin, dripped into the mortal world in a past age. Where those drops fell the Dark Muses were born.

Isha, like almost every being both mortal and immortal, felt the death of Slaanesh. She no longer had to hide. When Nurgle next came to visit her he found the cage empty and became all the more sorrowful for it. His garden bordered the Gardens of Isha that were grown in the rubble of Slaanesh's kingdom of debauchery.

Thankfully for Nurgle Khine had business elsewhere. A presumptuous bastard had set a throne of brass and bone in his desolate kingdom.

Great swathes of the Khorne's killing grounds were annexed as an older god began to take back what was stolen from him as he lay dead. Doombreed, most ancient and belligerent of Khonrn's human deamon princes, stood as slaughterer regent and to say that Khine was displeased at so insignificant a being sitting on his throne is truly insufficient.

Khine called to his side all the bitter and resentful and those whose hearts were full of hate. Furies and stalkers and other things cast out into the Formless Wastes. Many of the older and more cunning servants of Khorne decided where their passions truly lay and it was with hate more than it was with wroth.

The Outcast and the Lost wandered into the gathering storm and it was there that they parted ways with only token efforts to kill each other. The Outcast God looked upon the war that was to be and saw it for what it was, an opportunity to strike a blow at his own kind with borrowed strength. The Lost Knight wandered a different and less sure path. Malal made that warring pantheon of hate a triumvirate of loathing to contest the trinity of bloodlust.

Kaldor Draigo wandered onwards, his armour was in tatters and his sword was broken but he was unbowed. Soon his footsteps vanished from the ash of the wastes.

With sickening inevitability the Great Game ground on. It had a few new players and a few new pieces on the board but ultimately it was same game. The only certainty is change but that is certainty never the less. And Chaos; Chaos never changes.


End file.
